Good for you, my experience with Jekyll is closer to OP's experience with Node. I have a big website that I built in 2014, with tons of custom plugins, that is now stuck on Jekyll 2.x and Ruby 2.x, and has a ton of hidden C++ dependencies. The way I build it now is using a Dockerfile with Ubuntu 18.04. I probably could update it given enough effort, but I was rather thinking of rewriting it in Astro.js or Next.js.

This is the issue I have with the "build vs buy (or import)" aspect of today's programming.

There are countless gems, libraries or packages out there that make your life easier and development so much faster.

But software (in my experience) always lives longer than you expect it to, so you need to be sure that your dependencies will be maintained for that lifetime (or have enough time to do the maintenance or plug in the replacements yourself).

If you're looking for a stable target you should not even consider Next.

Yes indeed, that is the solution to modern IT problems - never update your Ubuntu 18 containers and you're set.

(Wish I was joking, but sadly I'm serious.)