This is one reason why whenever I build a new project, I build it inside of a Docker container.

That way, the project has just the dependencies it needs, and I know I can rebuild it at some point in the future and will be unlikely to run into problems when I do.

This works as long as your Dockerfile is reasonably reproducible and does its best to lock dependencies. However, this approach has failed me a couple of times in the past. For example, I rebuilt a container some weeks later, in the meantime a new version of clang had been released that just so happened to break my build due to a bug.

I personally use Nix these days, but the complexity is too high for me to recommend it to everyone for every software project.

My first step now when trying to resurrect old projects is to create a Docker container for it - that way I can install any old versions of anything (like node or PHP) I need without having to worry about it polluting anything else on the system.