It's partly a solution, but doesn't help when the 'enviroment' (OS, Node, compiler toolchains used in dependencies) has moved on and is no longer compatible with the old version-pinned npm packages, the same problem also exists in other programming ecosystems (just maybe not as extremely - but I have the same bad experience each time I want to write a blog post, because Jekyll usually breaks after a macOS update).
It's not Javascript or Node.js or NPM which is the problem though, but the 'culture' of offloading every little detail into its own dependency, nothing in the Javascript ecosystem technically requires this approach.
