I myself, several months ago, created an awesome-list of Node.js packages that I highly recommend. These are packages that meet specific needs, often with fewer (or none at all) dependencies or with much more optimal performance.
My list also includes people to follow on github (they all publish very interesting packages more or less often). Feel free to PR to add packages that fit into the repo description.
There is also the awesome-list of Sindresorhus accessible here.
List of other packages I'm keeping an eye on:
- undici (A HTTP/1.1 client, written from scratch for Node.js.)
- Fluent JSON Schema
- Tesseract.js (OCR)
- BoxedNode - Ship a JS file with Node.js in a box
- iobuffer (Read and write binary data in ArrayBuffers)
- Node re2 (Fast, safe alternative to backtracking regular expression engines)
- v8 compile cache (Require hook for automatic V8 compile cache persistence)
- Parsr (Transforms PDF, Documents and Images into Structured Data)
- cuid (Collision-resistant ids optimized for horizontal scaling and performance)
- dayjs (2KB immutable date-time library alternative to Moment.js)
- ncc (Compile a Node.js project into a single file).
- Private npm Registry
- Node watch (A wrapper and enhancements for fs.watch)
- ms (Tiny millisecond conversion utility)
📌 Feel free to make me proposals.
⬅️ 🌟 The different core modules: Crypto | ➡️ 💾 Database: Introduction