I feel very strongly about this: The single most important thing for a growing software project is Using Opinionated Tooling.
Too many new projects, libraries, frameworks, etc come around and broadcast "we're Unopinionated!" like that's some great thing.
You cannot, without exception, develop complex software without asserting and extrapolating opinions about design patterns, tools, frameworks, layout, etc somewhere in the stack. Its impossible. You'll end up with an unmaintainable mess.
Medium and Large companies will naturally develop a bunch of internal opinions about things. Internal tooling. CI. Development and Deployment environments. Those are all opinions that get built up over time, based on the experiences of the people who build them. This is fantastic; its how companies like Google and Amazon have reached such massive scale, but how many other companies start failing when they try the same.
Small companies and Startups do not have these opinions. They have to outsource their opinions, at least at the start. A large company might say "yeah we have our own blackboxed JS serverside framework, just use that it'll do logging, tracing, error reporting, its great." Small companies won't have that. So, use Rails, or Phoenix, or something that is highly opinionated. Learn what works. Learn what doesn't.
This is Javascript's fatal flaw. And it is massive. And it still has not been improved years later. There is an extreme lack of opinionated tooling. NextJS has been doing some very interesting work introducing a more productive and opinionated frontend development experience. The backend really has nothing similar; the closest we got was Meteor, and it has/had too many weird technical issues and poor design choices to be considered a good choice. The team behind it then mostly moved to Apollo, which reverted back to championing how unopinionated it is.
Makes sense why Apollo is such a clusterfuck then. Have you looked at Nest for Node on the server side? I'm using it for a client project right now and find it the best offering for server side javascript. The ecosystem _is_ still immature though relative to something like Rails or Laravel.
I don't feel that anything is wrong with it; it's just not the whole answer for many projects. You end up bundling tons of middleware for things like logging, metrics, tracing, authn, etc. If you use typescript, you inevitably end up wanting more type safety so you'll reach for resolver codegen, which Apollo does not do on the server (they do do it for the client). And it doesn't assert any opinions about how the rest of the app should be structured, such as business logic, dependency injection, etc.
Apollo Server would be a great component in a broader, opinionated server-side web framework.
Too many new projects, libraries, frameworks, etc come around and broadcast "we're Unopinionated!" like that's some great thing.
You cannot, without exception, develop complex software without asserting and extrapolating opinions about design patterns, tools, frameworks, layout, etc somewhere in the stack. Its impossible. You'll end up with an unmaintainable mess.
Medium and Large companies will naturally develop a bunch of internal opinions about things. Internal tooling. CI. Development and Deployment environments. Those are all opinions that get built up over time, based on the experiences of the people who build them. This is fantastic; its how companies like Google and Amazon have reached such massive scale, but how many other companies start failing when they try the same.
Small companies and Startups do not have these opinions. They have to outsource their opinions, at least at the start. A large company might say "yeah we have our own blackboxed JS serverside framework, just use that it'll do logging, tracing, error reporting, its great." Small companies won't have that. So, use Rails, or Phoenix, or something that is highly opinionated. Learn what works. Learn what doesn't.
This is Javascript's fatal flaw. And it is massive. And it still has not been improved years later. There is an extreme lack of opinionated tooling. NextJS has been doing some very interesting work introducing a more productive and opinionated frontend development experience. The backend really has nothing similar; the closest we got was Meteor, and it has/had too many weird technical issues and poor design choices to be considered a good choice. The team behind it then mostly moved to Apollo, which reverted back to championing how unopinionated it is.