I just today tried reviving an old v12.4 node project and node-gyp is trying to use python2 which I don't even have on my Macbook anymore.

That Python 2 crap hit me as well when working on an older project. It used node-sass which depended on node-gyp. Dealing with upgrading that was a pain because I had to upgrade so much more to get versions of everything that played nice together.

What really pissed me off about it was that Python 2 was already known to be nearing EOL when our project was started, so node-gyp should have been upgraded to work with Python 3 by then. And even more annoying was that node-gyp already had Node to run on, so why in the world was it coded to depend on Python at all!?