I have been programming with node for the last 3 years and I never had any dependency issues with node (at least for 3rd party dependencies). I cannot say that with python that requires using some tool be it docker or virtualenv to isolate them from the already installed ones.

Node's dependency managers npm/yarn just copy the versioned dependencies from their cache folder into the local node_modules folder and remove transitive dependencies duplicates when possible by flattening them into node_modules.

Lucky! I wrote a small internal app in node for my company that relied on an IMAP library. 3 months after launch, someone upgraded the library and my app stopped working. Stack traces were incomprehensible. No “how to upgrade” documentation in sight.

So I spent 2 hours and rewrote it in Java 8 with Maven.

Issues all gone. Node has some work to do before I’ll consider touching it again.