[mpartel]

Some examples of high-level decisions: - which web framework? - which database? which ORM? which transaction isolation level by default? - will this game/UI be multiplayer? - what's our testing discipline?

You can't loosely couple around questions like these most of the time, at last not without excessive abstraction.

For "how do I structure this reasonably isolated 0-1kLOC component", I agree, easy to fix later if needed.

[skohan]

I think there are always ways to minimize coupling. For example if most of the code you write is pure functions operating on values, then swapping out your ORM might be a bit laborious, but it's going to be largely just a matter of typing, not tricky problem solving.

And like for example if you want to change web frameworks, that's something you can do incrementally. If you're talking about front-end, just find a way to encapsulate your old code behind a clean interface and start implementing new components in the new framework. If you're talking about back-end, then you can just implement new endpoints in a new language if you want even, and gradually migrate things over when you have to modify them.