My experience from previous solo projects is that it's surprisingly much work to build and deploy even simple CRUD REST APIs with basic things like jwt authentication, permission checks, filtering, sorting and pagination no matter the language/framework. I've worked with Vert.x, Play Framework, Express.js, Go and the Serverless framework so far.
That's why my current solo project is actually a generator for basic REST APIs, it's currently in beta [1]. The idea is to describe the API you need in YAML, it is then being deployed directly from that.
Under the hood I'm using the Serverless framework with TypeScript which works quite well for me. Everything you need is available as npm packages these days and I found that since switching from plain JavaScript to TypeScript I'm finding errors in my code earlier on.