This is just my subjective experience, but when I was first getting into node 6 years or so ago, it was pretty wild. Libraries would constantly make breaking changes, you couldn't count on things working for more then a month. JS is very expressive, and people happily did crazy things with it, like write entire frameworks based around generator functions. TypeScript promised some sanity, but usually led to even more headaches, due to lack standardized tooling, ecosystem support, random errors and so on. Sooner or later every codebase seemed to be doomed to become an unmaintainable mess.
But now it's a lot better. There's more consensus on what should be used, and most frameworks seem somewhat stable. Tooling is straightforward, in part thanks to VSCode I guess. Things like ESLint, JSHint are now standard. Altogether it feels more robust.
