YMMV but I had a 4 year old project whose only dependencies were socketio and express and it booted right up. So stick to stable, mature projects and you're likely to be fine.
Just watch out because socketio must be version matched for client-server or you will get the most annoying errors and state inconsistencies in the world. That's a scary production update let me tell you. Version 2.3.0 still scares me to this day after trying to upgrade that without production downtime.