IME many of the earlier new frameworks were somewhat poor attempts at replicating established players from other languages. That resulted in a lot of cargo cult

IME many of the earlier new frameworks were somewhat poor attempts at replicating established players from other languages. That resulted in a lot of cargo culting of bad code, then inevitably churn. I think that's one (of several) reason(s) why Express became more ubiquitous early on. Then from there, since Express became the most popular, and it was more of a micro framework, it allowed multiple competing sub frameworks to emerge. I really tried to use some of the other JS frameworks at the time, and having migrated from Python / PHP always felt they were not very usable by comparison. Moreover, JS really encouraged the use of API driven development + React, at a time when that trend was in general growing. I bet this impacted the ORM development space, as I suspect FE style devs were perhaps more demanding of an ORM while more backend oriented devs were perhaps fine writing SQL. With other frameworks I find the coupling of ORM and template views to be slightly more natural. Maybe this is just me inventing story lines but its how it feels. I think the lack of a quality ORM _really_ hurt the most. Lastly there was a growing trend towards micro dependencies and assembling from parts, and I think it promised more than it could deliver. I think if Node had shipped a higher quality standard lib, perhaps akin to Go or (maybe) how Deno is trying to do, the story might have looked much different. This is my take as a consumer, rather than creator / maintainer of these frameworks, so not sure how accurate this is. Just my viewpoint with my dev career growing alongside the early emergence of Node.