What made your old Node code not work? I've picked up old node projects from up to 10 years ago and they all still work just fine, so I'm unclear what pain you encountered?
I get emails from Github with long lists of vulnerabilities on old toy projects where literally __zero__ dependencies are listed in package.json. It’s not so much the vulnerabilities that bother me, but the dependency conflicts, and in general a massive amount of infrastructure I have to buy into without even knowing it.