I would have picked Hono and Drizzle. In part because of the great TS support but also Hono is much faster than Express and supports Zod for validation out of the box. This stack would also allow to use any other runtime (Deno, Bun, or Cloudflare Workers).
Given they used TS and performance was a concern I would also question the decision to use Node. Deno or Bun have great TS support and better performance.
Given they used TS and performance was a concern I would also question the decision to use Node. Deno or Bun have great TS support and better performance.