I recently spent some time on reviving an old (FLOSS, all server-side, the only UI being CLI and an HTTP API) nodejs 8 software built mostly according to what was considered best practice at the time. I can confidently say you're missing important nuance here.

A counter-argument to this could be "most people were doing it wrong at the time and those best-practices proved to be not very sustainable so your old software was probably garbage already" but at that point we're entering the realm of dismissing reality.