Please explain on your fingers - why and when is Express needed in Node.js?

Question

Node.js

What does Express do? It is especially interesting how this or that logic looks like with and without an express.

Surely he does a lot of things, so I’ll clarify a little - is it possible (without using the word "framework" and without wording from the express official website) to explain on the fingers in which cases it is needed?

I apologize in advance if asking a question in this way is a bad form.

Answer 1

to write the last couple of pieces of code from this article
https://medium.com/@grantspilsbury/dry-node-js-ser...
in three lines, at the same time immediately get the already parsed request body, cookies, etc., and also in a couple of lines reply to a request

in what cases is it needed

by and large, in all cases when you need a web server on the node ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
, there are alternatives like Koa, Hapi, but even I didn’t notice that they really took off and are comparable in popularity