Just be careful about what third party packages you are using. It's not like users of other languages don't have the same problem (Case in point: I earn my sal

Just be careful about what third party packages you are using. It's not like users of other languages don't have the same problem (Case in point: I earn my salary working on several legacy Rails apps). I've worked on a Node application with express, underscore and redis (we didn't need a full DB -- name value pairs were fine). I'm not even sure if using express is worth it. In our case it stayed completely out of our way, so I can't really complain. My only regret was using jasmine for testing. I would definitely use mocha these days. For server side, just use Node modules and ES6. No need to complicate it with transpilers, build tools, etc, etc. Ironically, client side is much more of a hassle (I still haven't found a build tool that I think is worth using).