If I stop working on a project for 3 years, will I still be able to compile it, without losing an unpredictablt amount of time to fixing the toolchain? If not, then its not really stable, is it?
You will certainly be able to compile it. You might have hard time updating it though.
The current version of webpack was released 5 years ago. You can keep using eslint 8 which was released 4 years ago. This really isn’t the constantly changing space it was in the 2010’s
Updating is a different matter, if you're using multiple tools, hundreds of packages and several configuration files.
Which is why a unified tool that doesn't require configuring 20 tools at once is a good idea IMO.