I give it to you: npm is a Gran Bazaar mostly selling crap....but Node is brilliant.
I have been waiting for the dust to settle on the "Node is the worst idea of mankind" vs "Node is brilliant" before taking a look into it.
While you're waiting, there's always Golang...
The amount of breakages I get using my static site/blog generator has my leaning toward worst ever. If that's any indication then anything actually complicated would be breaking all the time.
This doesn't sound like a NodeJS problem.
It's a common problem; someone or something uses the tool badly, blame the tool.
I wanted to blame Brainfuck, but I realized it was me, not the tool.
I'm not sure if it's nodejs or the various npm packages are to blame, but a problem with the ecosystem node lives in is a node problem.