It's also two hours that would have been completely avoided if the author were familiar enough with Node to know to pin the version and not try to install 4 years of updates in one shot.

Most who are here saying that X, Y, or Z ecosystem "compiles and runs" fine after 4 years are talking about the time it takes to resume an old project in a language they're very familiar with running the same dependency versions, not the time it takes to version bump a project on a language that you don't know well without actually having it running first on the old version.

I can open my 4-year-old Node projects and run them just fine, but that's because I use the tools that the ecosystem provides for ensuring that I can do so (nvm, .nvmrc, engines field in package.json).

The author didn't update all dependencies, they just tried running it on a newer version of Node itself. That is definitely a use case included when most people talk about an ecosystem compiling and running fine after several years.

Pinning versions should’ve been the default, then.