Yeah, people are jumping the horse to claim any dev environment is superior and free of issues like this. I've contributed to some open source C++ projects and a lot of js/node projects, and in my experience, every C++ project is an adventure just to get the project compiling (it can be smooth running if the maintainers have a recently-updated guide specifically for your exact OS/distro version and the right versions of all the dependencies are in your distro's package manager, but anything off of this happy path is an ordeal, especially the case where you're working on another C++ project that wants a different version of the same dependency) while nearly every js/node project was up and running after just "npm install". Sure, it can go wrong and harder than that sometimes but it's worth appreciating that the standard case is pretty good.
Every project using native binary dependencies is prone to running into the kinds of dependency issues described in the OP article. I've run into similar situations with Java, PHP, and Python where there was some mismatch with a language library, a native binary, and my OS. I'm a fan of it when projects try to minimize their native binary dependencies for this kind of reason. Some js/node projects that have previously used a native binary dependency now use non-OS-specific WebAssembly binaries instead, which is great for how it removes potential issues.
If there is a native dependency, then moving major node versions or moving to arm can cause difficulties or straddling the python version the gyp build system is based on.
It's worlds easier than trying to insure your C/C++ build environment is prepped properly to build a binary.
Updating libraries is usually not too bad, even across major versions. But that can be a bit of a wormhole trying to get everything squared away and all versions updated. This seems to be particularly true since all major frameworks I've used have gone from snake case deps (framework-module) to @framework/module.
Every project using native binary dependencies is prone to running into the kinds of dependency issues described in the OP article. I've run into similar situations with Java, PHP, and Python where there was some mismatch with a language library, a native binary, and my OS. I'm a fan of it when projects try to minimize their native binary dependencies for this kind of reason. Some js/node projects that have previously used a native binary dependency now use non-OS-specific WebAssembly binaries instead, which is great for how it removes potential issues.