I just find it very weird that there are two standards here.

Express is ostensibly the analog of minimal APIs and ships with no validation. You pick your validation library and build on top of it. A less complete, less opinionated, bare-bones stack on which you build with explicit stack choices.

Nest.js is ostensibly the analog of controller APIs and ships with validation. A more complete, more opinionated approach where you lean in to stack defaults.

This makes total sense in the Node.js world; I don't see why controller and minimal have to have feature parity when they have different use cases and, like Express, it's possible to pull down third party validation libraries. Controller API is more opinionated like Nest.js while minimal is intentionally less opinionated like Express.