It reads like "life is suffering" and tbf unless you were born in first world high class that's hard to argue against.
Still, that'd mean that there's failure in parenting, as gen z seems to be ill-equipped to handle what's there - assuming that's all there is to it.
I'd definitely suggest at least considering Nest.JS.
There's totally nothing wrong with Express (or Koa or Fastify) projects, but Express based projects tend to share problems with all others based on minimalistic-based frameworks - no skeleton means tons of discussions about favorite ORM, Logger, Validation, whole story about service vs helpers etc.
If I can skip it, I always do. Decision paralysis can be a killer.
What OP probably means that business was able to pay a living wage for owners and nothing more. So there was no additional cash for hiring manager, not even thinking about something for "new owner".
I'm super happy with Fedora for ~ 4 years. It's always one/two versions behind (currently 37) and it never gave me any problems (compared to manjaro/arch/ubuntu and few other smaller distro that I've used, but names escapes me)
Fedora seems faster than Ubuntu out of the box on the same hardware.
It's also rock solid from my experience. That may be somehow related to docker doing heavy lifting when needed. Ofc YMMV.