This is only a problem in some parts of the ecosystem - but they are the parts that most 'tutorials' are written about, because they look shiny and fancy. If I'm blunt, they're the parts of the ecosystem that HN loves to gloat about in their "how I saved my company thousands of dollars by building a todo app with GlamorousLibraryJS" type posts.

The short answer: if you avoid the shiny tools that claim to do everything, you will not have this problem. And as a special case, avoid Gulp, which is mismanaged.

The single-responsibility libraries that have a well-defined scope, on the other hand, have often been sitting on npm unchanged for 5-6 years, because they are simply done, and they do what they need to. They will very likely never deprecate anything, as there is simply nothing to change.

I would argue that these libraries are actually doing a better job of stability than their counterparts in other languages.

Edit: An additional factor is that it's easy to write a tutorial about an extensive framework with a large scope; there's plenty of stuff to write about. Writing a tutorial about "this is how you make a function call to this library to parse a geo URI", on the other hand, probably isn't going to happen.

So if you follow third-party tutorials, you are naturally going to end up at the packages that are most prone to deprecations.