Good rundown, especially the honest framing that most of your latency is sitting in the Mongo call and not the runtime. One thing worth adding for anyone reading the type-stripping section as "great, I'll drop ts-node everywhere" -- the unsupported-syntax list in Node's own docs is longer than just enum and decorators. Parameter properties (the constructor(private foo: string) shorthand a lot of NestJS-flavored Express code uses) and TS import aliases (import Foo = Bar.Baz) also throw ERR_UNSUPPORTED_TYPESCRIPT_SYNTAX, same as enum declarations and namespaces with actual runtime values. None of those are exotic in a backend that grew up with decorator-style patterns even before using real decorators, so "just run node app.ts" can still blow up on day one for a reason that has nothing to do with enum.