I have been in your position about a year ago. The approached that helped me, was to not worry about all this.

Just start somewhere; and in a month or two, you would mostly know which libraries you need to add to your project.

The best way to go about it, is to check a few popular open source projects; what libraries they typically use.

> I am also asking if any of those libraries will be around in a year?

You can check the download stats of these in https://npmjs.com, and activity on the GitHub repo, before adding it to your project.

If they are still around, but have published a new major version to update a few APIs; you can slowly migrate to it.

If not, you'd read some Medium post or Hackernews discussion, about what is replacing that.

There's something called Greenkeeper (https://greenkeeper.io/) that integrates a GitHub bot to your repo, and files a PR when something needs to be upgraded.

You can implement something similar on your own, if you aren't interested in using something like this.