However, Rocket's ambitions take their toll. While still being actively developed, the releases are not as frequent as they used to be.

That is a massive understatement. Rocket is on RC3 of v0.5, the RC1 was released in 2021. So that is basically one small RC release a year... And v0.4 requires nightly and is not async so is hardly a viable version these days. This project is far closer to not being actively developed then this article makes it seem. IMO unless something seriously changes with the project Rocket is not a web framework worth considering these days.

It was a head of its time when it first came out, but is way behind the curve in its current form.

The last time I wrote a web service in Rust, I used Axum - in part because it seemed to be the Rust community's consensus that it was generally the best all-around option (and I didn't have time to prototype with a bunch of other frameworks).

Poem looks really interesting, though! I know the batteries-included approach doesn't appeal to everyone, but it's nice to be able to get so much off the shelf. Does anyone have experience with it yet they'd like to share?

To me as a beginner, Axum looks the easiest from just comparing these code samples.