Strongly agree - as someone much more comfortable within the node ecosystem, there's several libraries I'd rather use in place of Nest's choices. However it makes a great starting point for people not aware of the other options and who need an opinionated bootstrap.

If anyone's wondering my current template is routing-controllers, class-validator, tssyringe, and sequelize-typescript.

Separate issue, but if anyone can suggest a different query builder / orm in typescript that'd be truly appreciated. Imo typeorm is too much of an abstraction and sequelize works but requires custom types ever since v5

Until yesterday, I would've voted Prisma. There was actually a Show HN post recently that debuted Zapatos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273543. The top comment also mentions mammoth: https://github.com/Ff00ff/mammoth. Probably going to switch over to one of them as they're closer to raw to raw SQl and well typed.