Right, and therein lies the rub. Unless Debian wants to "boil the ocean" and burn a ludicrous amount of effort on repackaging every last npm and pip package for Debian, that position seems unsustainable long-term.

I'm of the opinion that Debian should create more distribution channels (that are available by default) where they are not the maintainers, and old releases are not forced to stay patched in order to remain installable.