The tragedy of running an old Node project

This is one reason why whenever I build a new project, I build it inside of a Docker container.

That way, the project has just the dependencies it needs, and I know I can rebuild it at some point in the future and will be unlikely to run into problems when I do.

This works as long as your Dockerfile is reasonably reproducible and does its best to lock dependencies. However, this approach has failed me a couple of times in the past. For example, I rebuilt a container some weeks later, in the meantime a new version of clang had been released that just so happened to break my build due to a bug.

I personally use Nix these days, but the complexity is too high for me to recommend it to everyone for every software project.