I've recently complained about the friction that comes with the setup of contemporary software projects, so I also want to notice when the needle is moving into the right direction: Some really promising features have recently landed in the current v22 stream of node.js.
First: a native node:sqlite module, which looks really promising. There are several sqlite binding available for node already, but having it directly on the platform eases the choice: always go with the standard lib.
Secondly: I always say that, just as a marine is a riffle man first, every typescript programmer is a javascript programmer first, so I'm happy that there will be support for using typescript without a separate compile step, by by striping away the ts-specific annotations at runtime.
Now, it would be great to have a boilerplate project which demostrates what can already be done without thirdparty dependecies. Maybe another item for the to-make list...