Of course nothing is. But there's a reason projects like "Talos" do exist: no terminal, no SSH, no package manager (how do we like package managers like NPM lately btw?), read-only filesystem, definitely no systemd, etc.
And then a minimal number of executables.
This does, definitely, reduce the attack surface.
I'm not speaking about this Show HN's project but there are such things as systems both more secure and requiring less maintenance than others.
Throwing in the towel and saying: "nothing can ever be 100% secure so we'll always need to patch so we may as well YOLO by accepting npm packages modified 3 minutes ago" is not the way to go forward either.