Apologies you had a bad experience. There's no doubt the original App Engine had some... quirks.
You may want to take a look at Managed VMs. All of the new runtimes are based on Docker images, are entirely extensible, and don't require the use of the original App Engine APIs:
You may want to take a look at Managed VMs. All of the new runtimes are based on Docker images, are entirely extensible, and don't require the use of the original App Engine APIs:
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/
You can use whatever Database or NPM modules you want.