Small company ops guy here - a bit over a year ago, I used to joke with my devs, asking them "So, what's this month's recommended way of installing node?". More recently we've been experiencing dependency hell, which is exacerbated by our small team not having enough time to upgrade to the latest LTS release. Node is definitely a language that you have to manage. It doesn't sit in the background and let you get on with writing stuff.

Is it the right tool for X or Y? I can't say, I'm not a dev. But it does require a lot of hand-holding and keeping current with the zeitgeist.