For years, I heard it's better to use cron, because the problem was already solved the right way(tm). My experience with cron has been about a dozen difficult fixes in production of cron not running / not with the right permission / errors lost without being logged / ... Changing / upgrading OSes became a problem. I since switched to a small node script with a basic scheduler in it, I had ZERO issues in 7 years. My devs happily add entries in the scheduler without bothering me. We even added consistency checks, asserts, scheduled one time execution tasks, ... and now multi server scheduling.

Deployments that need to configure OSes in a particular way are difficult (the existence of docker, kubernetes, snap are symptoms of this difficulty). It requires a high level of privilege to do so. Upgrades and rollbacks are challenging, if ever done. OSes sometimes don't provide solution when we go beyond one hardware.

If "npm start" can restrain the permissions to what it should be for the given version of the code, I will use it and I'll be happy.