Agreed on the "this needs to be Debian" part. If some of the most popular JS packages were available through the system package manager as normal *.deb packages

Agreed on the "this needs to be Debian" part. If some of the most popular JS packages were available through the system package manager as normal *.deb packages, I think people would be more likely to build on top of stable versions/releases. Stability (in the "it doesn't change" sense) is underrated.