None of the tools you mentioned are unsupported as of now, though. I recently updated a browserify based project from years ago to 16.3 in an afternoon and it just worked.

I remember the days I was afraid to do npm update the dependencies, I was copy pasting build script configurations for new projects, I used to use code mods every other month to make huge refactors (and badly), packages disappearing, every project inventing how to manage state (not just react)... All of this is past for me. Yeah of course it's just a data point but there's the fact that you can start a complex web app project with one command these days and not care about core dependencies. I expect it'll go only better. Maybe it's me getting experienced but I certainly wasn't a beginner few years ago, not even close. I'd love to hear what kind of difficulties you are having with your projects though, it's very possible that I'm missing something.