I have professional experience with Django and Laraval, but I started my web dev journey with NodeJS. NodeJS is easier to learn in a sense that when u start a side project for learning, it’s config files are very light to be managed. What dependencies in there and not in there can be seen at first sight. In the case of Django, it is a very heavy/ robust framework, it has its own ORM, built-in authentication, etc.. If you click on its settings.py, there are like overwhelming amount information.

I would suggest you start with standalone NodeJS. I found learning stand-alone NodeJS is a bit tedious, but it surely will help u understand Express.JS better.

Some advanced topics for NodeJs, stream definitely is one, event listener(backbone of socket.io), user-authentication stuff (caching vs db)