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I have been trying to use Node.js since it was first released, and in all of the intervening years, not once have I encountered a single Node.js project that worked as described when using the directions for initial setup, testing, and/or deployment in that project's official documentation.

Is this due to immature package management? Are there other structural problems with Node.js projects that prevent them from working as intended? Or am I just unlucky and happen to test Node.js projects and frameworks only when they have critical bugs?

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    Interestingly, one very common criticism of the Node.js community is the exact opposite: that even very simple projects (transitively) depend on dozens if not hundreds other projects, and that people are much too "trigger-happy" when it comes to depending on third-party code. The only way that the community has gotten into this "problem" of everything depending on everything is precisely because all those projects work so well, and are so reliable and dependable. If the projects "didn't function properly", depending on them would be impossible. Commented Apr 28, 2020 at 21:58
  • The fact that people depend on Node.js projects to such an extent that this is seen as a problem proves that those projects "function properly". Commented Apr 28, 2020 at 21:59
  • Every developer I know who uses Node.js projects agrees with my assessment that its dependency management is snafu. I guess that many devs just do not take version locking of dependencies seriously. Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 17:56

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Most likely the projects work fine, but the documentation doesn't. You're probably suffering from a common problem when developers write documentation, that to us, certain steps seem "obvious," or we have forgotten that we need them, either because we do that step all the time as a matter of habit, or because we only had to do that step once a long time ago.

That's why you should regularly test your deployments from a completely clean system.

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  • The most recent failure I've experienced with Node was Strapi, where following the deployment documentation completely broke the project, and the only solution was to rebase. It seems strange that adding an optional dependency broke the whole thing even when it wasn't invoked and then removing that optional dependency did not solve the problem, even when all cached files were removed and all project node modules reinstalled. Commented Apr 29, 2020 at 17:54

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