> At which point was nodejs five years older than the distro it shipped on?
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1259840/why-an-old-nodejs-ve...
Nodejs v4.x was "new" when Ubuntu 16.04 LTS came out. It was added to its apt repos, LTS releases are supported for 5+ years, and LTS policy is not to update major versions of software within a release.
So while nodejs was pumping out new major versions every 6-months, people running Ubuntu 16.04 and installing "apt-get install nodejs" were stuck on the same ancient version.