> Want to have two pieces of software on one computer that rely on... idk, two different versions of libwebsockets? Yeah, you’ll need either docker/overlayfs, or some filesystem or pkgconfig hack that I’m sure a comment reply will helpfully mention if you want two have to versions of a library installed for two different executables.

Just setup the correct flag / env variable. That's not named a "hack", that's named knowing how to use a computer.

If you do not know how to compile and link an hello world in C. Then indeed, you should probably stay with an hello world in NPM/JS and its 1500~ packages dependencies.