One suggestion I have would be to include a very minimal implementation of login management (basically just properly hash/salt passwords and provide some easy way to add users). I've used Django before for the sole reason that it includes a database and user management because some API had to be login only since said API had high resource usage.

I can see how having your own database is kind of "minimal" in the Java sense of the word. You don't need to install 50 different packages just to make a simple web app. There are minimal frameworks in the sense that they only provide a basic web server, but those are so minimal that you are forced to install a bunch of packages. It's minimal in the sense that create-react-app was minimal (RIP).