I know where your coming from, a few months back I had a run in with getting a yeoman generator working on my system. I had all sorts of problems with that.

You probably already aware but just in case your not one possible option for you is to try a vm like virtual box using one of bitmani's pre configured systems

It's not a silver bullet but it may help

PS

If you do give virtual box a go don't use shared folders, at least not until you have got your build tools installed and running.

I'm a mobile developer by profession but I just started working on a web side project. The first web stuff I've touched in almost a decade! I feel your pain.

There's so much that can go wrong in modern web dev it seems.

The tech stack I'm using is: Nodejs backbone mongoDB

Is this the kind of thing you mean by modern JS approach?