I built a project with Express, custom authentication, Turbolinks/StimulusJS, Mongoose and ended up using the similar approach to Rails anyway.

Rails with Hotwired seems to be the ultimate one person framework DHH wrote about today - https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-one-person-framework-711e6318.

Really want to try and use Rails for future projects but the magic is just too much for someone new to Ruby/Rails. I had to rewrite the routes with brackets in Rails to understand the working.