I tried to build an old outsourced project with a sky high js stack and it's just breaking everywhere. I believe rewriting it in another stack will be faster than figuring out this mess.

The sinister thing about NPM dependency hell is that it's impossible to estimate how long it'll take to fix bar some very general rules of thumb (if gyp breaks that's 3 hours and everything else takes twice as long because you have to tiptoe around it), so trying to fix it feels like gambling.