I don't know that I agree with this article, while there is absolutely a problem with package/framework/build tools churn that makes development super painful, I don't feel that developing with JavaScript has been any more painful than developing with VB, C#, PHP etc was in the past.
All languages have their pain points, and modern JS/TS, while undisputably having their quirks, aren't particularly more quirky than JS (IMHO)
I recently got back to a web app with node I'd been working on two years ago, and I'm finding packages deprecated, command-line arguments that no longer work, etc. Lots of breaking changes all the time. There's definitely something worse than average with the node development experience. Things are quickly changing and at the same time very poorly documented.
Well, why did you choose packages that change quickly and are poorly documented then? There are packages that, OTOH, have up to zero dependencies, and haven't changed in years; if you consider those stale, I guess nobody can help you.
I chose the most basic and common packages I could find (terser and rollup), and the changing, no longer valid command-line options I was talking about were command-line options of the npm package manager.
Could you explain which command line options, since AFAIK npm options haven’t changed in years, especially the basic ones, eg npm install.
The majority of packages in JS land change quickly and are poorly documented, unfortunately :(
There certainly are stable packages, but sometimes to do what you need to do there is no other option.
I took a break from my 3rd attempt at learning Node (which I have since abandoned permanently) to learn C and write my own software 3D renderer in it. I found this, to my surprise, a vastly simpler and more pleasant experience.