I don’t like to reply to an agreement with a disagreement, but I find Express-style middleware exactly the kind of magic and type-safety defeating stuff I prefe

I don’t like to reply to an agreement with a disagreement, but I find Express-style middleware exactly the kind of magic and type-safety defeating stuff I prefer to avoid. You can surely make it safer and more explicit by, for instance, creating a new wrapper for your Router or whatever. But by default the interface promotes casting/coercion of Request etc and just blindly asserting that you’re sure the middleware you’re expecting is attached. In the past, I’ve worked around this by wrapping Express to make any middleware dependencies explicit on each route, and by making “middleware” actually just pure functions which return whatever state they derived from the Request. Essentially a Route just becomes a pipeline of composable functions. It worked very well, but in hindsight I found I got almost no value out of Express itself at that point.