Yes, I completely see your point. I really enjoyed using Koa on its own (still in production), and have recently come to respect Fastify after listening to a JS Party podcast with the author. I'm seriously considering going with a lightweight library, as satisfying as annotating routes with decorators is, I'm not sure the benefits out outweight the problems its caused. But I'm also a fan of not having to re-invent the wheel every time I want to make an application...

There's nothing wrong with old-school, but I do feel a dagger going through me when I see `var Protocol = module.exports = function () {` as a function declaration in a modern codebase. My TS code looks very similar to Rust or Go code. The fact that such syntax is possible is paretly why I want to move away, even if it does show just how versatile JS really is.

I'm a bit more worried about dropping an ORM. I've also tried knex + objection for my own website, but still feel it's not quite there. Pure SQL scares me, especially with TypeScript. It feels like a lot of boilerplate for different entities and very little safety in case of mispelt SQL queries, but I respect the power and simplicity of SQL.

I'm not sure Docker gets much love outside of the cloud. Writing a Dockerfile is wonderful, actually reploying and running them is a whole different story... It's a very practical tool, but I'm not sure it can live up to the academic status needed to teach it.

Valuable to students, yes. But it all requires solid reasoning and justification, and that's perhaps harder for a student :D