[willsmith72]

I did the same research a few months ago. There are a lot of really cool alternatives which is fun and exciting, but at the end of the day I went with express. It's super stable, huge community, endless online tutorials and content.

The most tempting alternatives were hono and fastify. Hono felt not mature enough.

At the end of the day your server framework is very rarely the bottleneck in your system's performance, so it matters less.