The tragedy of running an old Node project

> Two hours of work after 4 years sounds ... perfectly acceptable?

It's really not. I'm in the same situation with a Go + React project I haven't really touched in 3 years. The Go part is just `go build`, it still works after 3 years and I have a build in a fraction of a second. The React project doesn't build anymore at all. I used Parcel 2 at the time, and it turns out it's incompatible with a Mac M1 for some reason, and it's hard to update in my case. I also used Antdesign and some components (icons specifically) apparently disappeared. It should not be so hard.

I feel like you've just proffered a second success story. It can get worse. I've worked on software whose "dusting off" involved swapping the entire dep tree because the remote that Bower was using no longer existed, or manually compiling pinned versions of dependencies that Homebrew no longer offered. Sometimes it took days to get everything working.

Go would be much worse than Node.js in most cases since dependencies directly reference GitHub projects which could have been deleted whereas NPM has a cache and immutability guarantee which makes old NPM modules available and unchanged.

You rely way less on dependencies when writing Go code though. That’s in big parts why it doesn’t break nearly as much (or at all).

Go also has the goproxy