I'm talking about NPM modules and the build toolchain (which consists of even more NPM modules). This stuff goes stale very quickly (at the 10-year scale). It's good for a project that is kept continuously alive (i.e. when there is a team of developers that is continuously making changes to the project), but not when the project sits on a shelf for 10 years and then needs to be modified.
This is a good point, but if you take NPM / Yarn / Bower (RIP) with a grain of salt and secure your codebase against failures, they work nicely as a toolchain.
Do you mean committing node_modules to the Git repository? Unfortunately, that's not a panacea with build tools, because some of them contain non-JS code that is tightly coupled to Node and OS versions.
