Well your argument is a lot more nuanced than the original comment I responded to. And I agree, it is burdensome especially for people not familiar with NodeJS that there isn't a one-size-fits-all framework. I don't really know the main causes why it happened, but I guess people felt satisfied with Express & Koa though it left, and still leaves, a lot for programmers to do by themselves.
Perhaps because Express & Koa were "good enough" there never was a large enough momentum behind say SailJS to make it work. Nevertheless my experience with ORMs or scaffold generators has been that I always feel they are one custom use case away from turning from time-savers to time-sinks. When you write your own SQL and implement your own models/services or whatever abstraction you decide to use, you get a much deeper understanding of what is going on than just trusting your framework to do it for you. And is that good or bad? That is certainly a topic for debate.
> Perhaps because Express & Koa were "good enough" there never was a large enough momentum behind say...
This is interesting to me, because Ruby has Sinatra (and others) that compare well to Express/Koa. Python has Flask which is very popular, as well as a number of fantastic alternatives. These ecosystems have very mature, well designed, small web frameworks, but still people choose the larger frameworks in these ecosystems, and all of the frameworks get good maintenance.
I wonder if it's a cultural thing in the JS ecosystem. Maybe the ease of publishing a package creates a race to the bottom in terms of package scope, which makes it so difficult to sustain larger more all-encompassing packages.
I've worked with Ruby+Rails/Sinatra/Cuba, Python+Flask/Django/Bottle/Sanic, and Node+Express, and when I was in the Node ecosystem I sometimes really wanted that Rails/Django equivalent – not always, but the lack of it would cause me to avoid Node for large backend projects.
I am a big fan of Knex for just this reason. It's not an ORM, just a migration manager and query builder. It makes easy stuff easy, and for complex stuff it gets out of your way.
If you need complex relationship models, ObjectionJS sits on top and will auto-manage relationship tables and all that nasty stuff for you.
Perhaps because Express & Koa were "good enough" there never was a large enough momentum behind say SailJS to make it work. Nevertheless my experience with ORMs or scaffold generators has been that I always feel they are one custom use case away from turning from time-savers to time-sinks. When you write your own SQL and implement your own models/services or whatever abstraction you decide to use, you get a much deeper understanding of what is going on than just trusting your framework to do it for you. And is that good or bad? That is certainly a topic for debate.