My big problem with sveltekit so far has been how strongly it wants you to use their back end.

I already have my own back end, but sveltekit is all about using their back end stuff. And their back end is 100% all in on serverless functions. If you want to write a more traditional back end and do something like grab private API keys when your service starts up, well sorry no easy way to do that, although there is an active git issue thread with people pretty much begging for the functionality.

Doing stuff like initializing logging libraries and passing them to models, or fetching API keys from secure storage buckets, is such a very common operation in any at-scale app, that I am beyond obscenely surprised sveletekit doesn't offer an out of the box way to do those things.