Depends. Sometimes you want something like Rails or Django. Then express and similar "a la carte" solutions won't help you and you'll end up re-inventing frame

Depends. Sometimes you want something like Rails or Django. Then express and similar "a la carte" solutions won't help you and you'll end up re-inventing frameworks and re-implementing the same old bugs and mistakes. Sometimes you just want a small single-purpose server. Then Node and NPM shine and big frameworks seem like unwieldy behemoths in comparison. Personally I'd say Node isn't a good choice for the former and you'd be better off with something powered by Ruby, Python or PHP (i.e. Rails, Django etc). And I say that as someone who's been almost exclusively using JavaScript for the past couple of years.