There is a good solution. It's actually a great solution: Write everything in plain JavaScript. You get a great language to develop in. All your problems will go away. No dependency hell. Excellent load times and performance. Superb compatibility.
Every single footgun from PHP but wrapped in a nice syntax so people don't understand they are in danger.
I'm deeply impressed by the Javascript community. What they have managed to create using a that language is amazing.
But please people, do yourself and everyone who ever has to touch your code base a favor and use TypeScript.
So I am just taking advantage of that to help spread awareness about the JS problems.
In one of my previous job, the main product was 100% pure Javascript (using AngularJS), with a few (vendored) third-party scripts, and it was very nice to work on it.
No package.json, no dependency issues, and above else, the workload we had was always related to business, and almost never related to external technical constraint such as a depreciated dependency.
The lack of pre-processing steps, combined with good CSS and a well-formed DOM made it one of the rare project in my work history that didn't create any rewrite-envy.
AngularJS or not, the main point is that avoiding piling layers of tooling that might force you to an upgrade for purely technical reasons was a nice experience.
If you are one programmer it may work, but many of us work in teams. JS is horrible for that as you need a lot of discipline (which often does not carry over well from team to team) in order to write "good JS".
We use Elm now. Elm translates well to JS (quick to compile and Elm is designed to map well to JS). We use Elm libs, but not nearly as much as in the unholy React+jQuery (yes, that's a bad idea) code it replaces.
All is compiled into one bundle. For the browsers the result is much less to download. For us devs it is a very different development flow: once the compile errors (shown in the IDE) are gone, it just works.
Compared to the loads runtime bugs in JS, we are confident this is a huge step forward and a good foundation to build on top of.