It's also two hours that would have been completely avoided if the author were familiar enough with Node to know to pin the version and not try to install 4 years of updates in one shot.
Most who are here saying that X, Y, or Z ecosystem "compiles and runs" fine after 4 years are talking about the time it takes to resume an old project in a language they're very familiar with running the same dependency versions, not the time it takes to version bump a project on a language that you don't know well without actually having it running first on the old version.
I can open my 4-year-old Node projects and run them just fine, but that's because I use the tools that the ecosystem provides for ensuring that I can do so (nvm, .nvmrc, engines field in package.json).
The author didn't update all dependencies, they just tried running it on a newer version of Node itself. That is definitely a use case included when most people talk about an ecosystem compiling and running fine after several years.
In some ecosystems, yes, backwards compatibility is a given, but not in most. Python versions behave in much the same way as Node, with you having to make sure you're using the same Python version this time as last time in order to be able to install the same dependency versions. Java has been better in recent years, but Java 8->9 can take several hours to get working on even a small project.
Most who are here saying that X, Y, or Z ecosystem "compiles and runs" fine after 4 years are talking about the time it takes to resume an old project in a language they're very familiar with running the same dependency versions, not the time it takes to version bump a project on a language that you don't know well without actually having it running first on the old version.
I can open my 4-year-old Node projects and run them just fine, but that's because I use the tools that the ecosystem provides for ensuring that I can do so (nvm, .nvmrc, engines field in package.json).