I find that a 6-month-old JS project will often not even boot since its exhaustive dependency list will be out of date and now mutually incompatible. You have to feed a JS project with updates every couple of hours, or it will die like a Tamagotchi.
I've seen comments like this almost daily this week.
Does HN not use lockfiles or something? Your node/npm project will work just fine if you use the same version of node/npm and have a lockfile.
Maybe you're using npm i (which can upgrade dependencies in some cases) instead of npm ci [0] (which always uses the lockfile dependencies).
In any case, this is a general problem of package managers and has nothing to do with the language. You'll need something similar if you're using _any_ external dependency in Rust, Python, Go, etc.
