Perhaps if it's a project that only you and maybe a few other people will work on. But I think there's value in using tooling that other contributors from that

Perhaps if it's a project that only you and maybe a few other people will work on. But I think there's value in using tooling that other contributors from that ecosystem will be comfortable using. I say this as someone who doesn't really like the JS ecosystem and its churn. I suppose you could argue the JS community itself has valued novelty over using tooling others will be familiar with. But if you have two tools that do roughly the same thing, one known to a majority of contributors and one known to a minority, I would go with the more popular.