I've found the space to currently watch for low-dependency "as modern vanilla as we can" backend stacks is the Deno ecosystem, including and maybe especially th

I've found the space to currently watch for low-dependency "as modern vanilla as we can" backend stacks is the Deno ecosystem, including and maybe especially the growing JSR repository. There are some very nice low-dependency ESM backend frameworks and libraries growing "Deno-first" to keep an eye on. Many of them still run on Node and/or Bun, too.