I've been using Sveltekit, which offers a back end server if you use their `node-adapter`.
Sveltekit uses an intuitive file based routing system, so for side projects at least, you can build out an app/POC very quickly.
Personally, I like Sveltekit's back end server better than Rails (to be fair, I haven't used Rails heavily since v3/v4) and Express. Having said that, I'm not sure Sveltekit's node adapter has been proven to scale yet.
Rails has a lot of nice stuff baked in though. So in terms of the many other moving parts of making an app, such as migrations, db connectivity, I think that's where a lot of time can be added on the Node side, especially if you don't already have a shortlist of go-to libraries for the core functionality you want/need.
Being able to deploy Sveltekit to Cloudflare Pages is pretty amazing. And with their new auto-adapter, you don't even have to change anything from the basic init setup and it just works.
Sveltekit uses an intuitive file based routing system, so for side projects at least, you can build out an app/POC very quickly.
Personally, I like Sveltekit's back end server better than Rails (to be fair, I haven't used Rails heavily since v3/v4) and Express. Having said that, I'm not sure Sveltekit's node adapter has been proven to scale yet.
Rails has a lot of nice stuff baked in though. So in terms of the many other moving parts of making an app, such as migrations, db connectivity, I think that's where a lot of time can be added on the Node side, especially if you don't already have a shortlist of go-to libraries for the core functionality you want/need.