I may just be an old school Node.js developer but I don't like using frameworks like NestJS and Prisma. Like you said they don't give you very much flexibility outside of the "chosen path".

I think in order for students to learn they should be using lower level packages directly. So something like Express or Koa + the SQL driver directly. Learning the core concepts underneath is more valuable to students than learning a specific ORM or framework that abstracts all the details away.

Learning how to deal with dependencies is a similar thing. I don't think any course would be complete if it teaches Node without also teaching how to build a Dockerfile to package up your application and the snapshot of it's NPM dependencies as a container image.

Building a compiled binary with Rust or Go is one language specific way to solve the problem of packaging dependencies, but you have an opportunity to also teach students a general purpose tool like Docker container images, which can be used to solve lots of different dependency packaging and distribution problems, not just for NPM, but also your static files, your specific runtime binary versions, any system packages you might need, etc.