I stumbled across this page that details best practices of using Express in production:
https://expressjs.com/en/advanced/best-practice-performance.html

There are things on this list that we don't do properly, for example:

• We do not use gzip compression
• We use synchronous functions, like console.log (instead of an asynchronous logging library) See NDS-744
• We need to set NODE_ENV="production" (this is hopefully just an additional ENV call in the Dockerfile)
• We currently serves all static files directly from Express (instead of delegating to a reverse proxy or the ingress loadbalancer) we only serve a single endpoint, the rest are static files

This ticket is complete when we have addressed the above concerns, and either mitigated their effects or determined that their effects will be minimal.