I think the culture of Node comes from the earlier culture of in-browser JavaScript. When running on the browser platform you have to make sure your libraries are up to date and maintained, otherwise you're at the mercy of browser updates breaking things from under your feet (this is less bad now, but it was awful in the days of IE<9, and on android before they started shipping auto-updating Chrome webview)

Consequently, JavaScript developers got used to the burden of maintenance and rapidly updating to the latest versions of libraries, and this culture carried through to Node (partly because a lot of libraries are shared between node and the web).

Having said that, if you pick your libraries well, it's not too bad these days. When I upgraded from Node 12 to Node 14 earlier this year, I had to upgrade the `pg` package to a newer version that supported Node 14 (there was one available), but I didn't have to make any code changes. And other than that I've had no forced version upgrades in a long time.

I guess if you're lookig at 5-10 year timescales with literaly no maintenance then this would be a different matter though.