Rather than changing express's syntax, I would much rather have a better express boilerplate generator with an opinionated stack with good documentation/justification. I recently started learning express/node and wasted weeks googling for blog posts for each dependency to figure out how to configure them. I guess this is somewhat valuable for end-to-end understanding but not for productivity. There are a bunch depend…
In some ways we benefit. Sometimes its harder to replace us not just because of skill, but because of countless layers of byzantine and mundane information we’ve memorized about a system. It just not cost effective to stuff all of that crap into someone else’s brain if you don’t have to.
However whenever there is a way to reduce the cruft to productivity ratio, the power is staggering. That’s your “10x” developer right there, someone who gets to actually think a higher percentage of the time.