We're in ... let's call it a transitional period at work. I've got something like a dozen versions of node being managed by asdf. And in half of the projects I work on regularly, I consistently get warnings about this particular project failing to build.
One day, I'll actually look up what it actually is, and what it does, and why it's being built, but is apparently optional.
Everybody complains about it, and understandably so, but if it didn't exist you'd probably instead have one set of potential similar problems *per* native module which has a good chance of not actually being better overall.
The counterargument is, I guess, "well, only people who can write their own high quality build setup in-tree should be writing things that bind to external code," and I do sometimes dream of that, but it's not hard to see the downsides of living in *that* world instead either.