For those who don't have too too much time to spend comparing stacks, looking at download trends is sometimes a decent heuristic for weeding out which you might not want to throw into a production system yet. Shameless plug for a site I made to help visualize that

logging - morgan vs winston - popularities seem similar, although winston has a bit of a lead: https://npmcharts.com/compare/morgan,winston

validation - express-validator vs joi - joi no question: https://npmcharts.com/compare/express-validator,joi

SQL ORMs - sequelize and knex were neck and neck for a while, but sequelize seems to have pulled ahead in the last couple months. bookshelf is way behind. https://npmcharts.com/compare/knex,bookshelf,sequelize