> every TypeScript project I find from 2021 or earlier is simply impossible to build nowadays,
This is the fault of all the bullshit tools that were never any good to begin with (Webpack, Babel, etc) and the Node ecosystem generally causing pain. If you had a package-lock.json you should (in theory) be able to install all of those and it should work. Of course, this relies on dependencies of dependencies actually following semantic versioning but I'm fairly sure many packages on npmjs.org do not follow semantic versioning.
Worst case scenario, you can take your TS files and put them in a newly created project. Preferably the project has a minimal number of build tools, eg, 1. Such as Vite, for example. This effectively replaces easily 5 or 6 major load bearing dependencies that used to be necessary.
Even better: Just use Deno, where it doesn't need any of this to build and run TS files!
This is the fault of all the bullshit tools that were never any good to begin with (Webpack, Babel, etc) and the Node ecosystem generally causing pain. If you had a package-lock.json you should (in theory) be able to install all of those and it should work. Of course, this relies on dependencies of dependencies actually following semantic versioning but I'm fairly sure many packages on npmjs.org do not follow semantic versioning.
Worst case scenario, you can take your TS files and put them in a newly created project. Preferably the project has a minimal number of build tools, eg, 1. Such as Vite, for example. This effectively replaces easily 5 or 6 major load bearing dependencies that used to be necessary.
Even better: Just use Deno, where it doesn't need any of this to build and run TS files!