Take a look at https://conductor.build/ - they really pioneered this whole direction of using git worktrees. Cursor will soon look like their app, Opencode will soon look like their app, etc.
I migrated from ts-rest to Effect/HttpApi. It's an incredible ecosystem, and Effect/Schema has over taken my domain layer. Definitely a learning curve though.
I believe Effect Schema fully supports Standard Schema, the issue is that it supports much more than Standard Schema, so not all schemas will work and thus provide compile time errors.
I agree, some of there examples are a little overly complicated by their quest to be hyper composable. In fact they should probably remove that example. I am currently using it with Remix, and using their @effect/platform package to produce a simple web handler (request: Request) => Response (thank remix for heavily promoting the adoption of web standards).
I fully agree parts of the ecosystem are complex, and likely not fully ready for broad adoption. But I do think things will simplify with time, patterns will emerge, and it will be seen as react-for-the-backend, the de facto first choice. effect + schema + platform + cluster will be an extremely compelling stack.
I've had a very similar experience, and have been slowly moving from zod and ts-rest to @effect/schema and @effect/platform/HttpApi as well as migration to Effect Match from ts-pattern. There is a learning curve but its a pretty incredible ecosystem once you are in it for a bit.
I think the real turning point was typescript 5.5 (May 2024). The creator of typescript personally fixed a bug that unlocked a more natural generator syntax for Effect, which I think unlocks mainstream adoption potential.
From my understanding trpc is very similar, however, the rpc mechanism is not a standard. ts-rest produces openapi schemas and speaks REST over http, as well as a typed client.
That being said, I am actually slowly migrating off ts-rest and adopting @effect/schema and @effect/platform/HttpApi, I foresee this being the direction the typescript ecosystem heads in over the next few years. However, the APIs are not stable yet and it has a bit of a learning curve, so would not adopt lightly
zod is great, but I have been moving to @effect/schema and think it deserves a mention here. @effect/schema is the evolution of io-ts, which originally inspired zod.
It supports decoding as well as encoding, and fits natively into the rest of the effect ecosystem.
It does come with the cost of importing effect, so might not be the best in certain scenarios. However, there are smaller options than zod if that is a concern.