2008 BrowserJS still works in today's browsers.
2012 NodeJS code still works today (look at this v0.10.48 NodeJS docs for example: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v0.10.x/api/http.html )
I've been working on react-native recently, and this is by far the most difficult "framework" (or system, or library, or whatever else you want to call it) i've ever had to work with regarding dependencies.
Every. single. change. breaks. And it seems to have deep dependencies on exact versions of many other tools, and changing them causes all kinds of hell. It's awful, and it's what I see as "dependency hell". We are like 5 patch versions behind latest right now, but every other patch version between ours and current either won't build on one platform, won't start due to mismatched dependencies, requires an alpha version of react proper, or breaks all of our tests.
But before that i've worked on at least a dozen mid-sized+ node and browser based projects, and i've never had major issues with upgrades. For the most part they work if you stay within patch or minor versions, and even major upgrades only really hurt if you are impacted by the breakage, which in my experience is pretty rare (just looking at one monorepo-style project that has about 150 direct dependencies, i would probably spend about 2 hours a month on keeping them up to date, and just for fun, i went back to a commit from 3 years ago just now, and it still installs and runs fine.
If you stick to documented features, don't try to abuse or be clever with interfaces that aren't well defined, wrap any "iffy" libraries in your own interfaces to make switching or re-implementing them easier, and overall vet your deps a bit before installing them, it's pretty smooth sailing.
Even with Nodejs I have code running that is more than 6 years old happily doing useful stuff.
So I'm not sure I understand your comment.
There is just a lot of churn in the library/framework space for JS. There are constantly people trying to invent "like X but better", where X can be absolutely anything in your JS workflow.
If you don't use npm and only rely on the builtin node APIs this would not apply to you as much, though.
On top of that there are always new language features being introduced to EcmaScript and implemented in V8. This means that if you're not using those latest features, some might say your code is outdated.
Complaints like this always mystify me. Would things be better if what you describe wasn't the case?
I usually use Express(2010), Socket.io(2014) and React(2013) for new projects.
The libraries that break with new versions are the ones that rely on exotic features.
Edit: I probably wasn't clear enough that I was joking.
Edit 2: I also found out that the LTS release should receive 30 months of maintenance. They say that end of life for node 10 will be April 2021.