Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by “…extended toward the backend”?

IMO all the extra flavoring on the front end comes from everyone having their own approach to modeling UIs and managing state for UIs. I don’t see anything similar on the backend - HTTP server packages seem mostly similar, data access packages seem to be a fairly small/thin layer.

I’m not deep into the node ecosystem, help me see how Ben & Jerry have contributed to the backend :-D

Original author here, thanks for the comment! I also think that backend would be an interesting subject to try and reduce, if only to not constantly wade through 100s of Dependabot pull requests... It's a very different scenario where you will want to optimize different things (code size usually does not matter as much, for example) and you have various deployment options (serverless, containerized, edge, ...) etc. so quite the Pandora's box, I think. Interesting nonetheless!

I've found the space to currently watch for low-dependency "as modern vanilla as we can" backend stacks is the Deno ecosystem, including and maybe especially the growing JSR repository. There are some very nice low-dependency ESM backend frameworks and libraries growing "Deno-first" to keep an eye on. Many of them still run on Node and/or Bun, too.