> I wish there had been a convention that lets the correct version of Node run without me manually having to switch between them.

For what it's worth, I think .tool-versions is slowly starting to creep into this space.

Mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/) and ASDF (https://asdf-vm.com/) both support it.

Big reason I prefer ASDF to nvm/rvm/etc right now is that it just automatically adjusts my versions when I cd into a project directory.