node-gyp is a huge source of these issues for Node projects, especially older ones.

For those reading this who don't know much about node - node-gyp is how you pull in native code libraries to Node projects, typically for performance reasons. You get the same sorts of build issues with it that you can get whenever you start having binary, or source, dependencies, and you need the entire toolchain to be "Just Right(tm)".

I run into this issue with older Node projects on ARM Mac machines (Still!), but I run into similar issues with Python projects as well. Heck some days I still find older versions of native libraries that don't have working ARM builds for MacOS!

Node used to have a lot more native modules, in newer code you typically don't see as much of that, and accordingly this is much less of an issue now days.

> I always try to remember to put the node version in my package.json

This 100x over!

> For those reading this who don't know much about node

I would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant, thank you!