Released in April 2022, Node 18 entered LTS (Long-Term Support) later that year and officially reached its End-of-Life in April 2025. So, why are we writing about an "old" version in 2026?
For small microservices or internal tools, Node 18's test runner eliminated configuration fatigue. No more jest.config.js , no more mocha --timeout . Just node --test and go. Streaming in Node has always been powerful but verbose. Node 18 shipped the Web Streams API as a global, matching the spec used in browsers. node 18
Node 18 fixed that. By shipping the , it finally aligned the server with the browser. Released in April 2022, Node 18 entered LTS
// Before Node 18 (and 17.5 experimental) const fetch = require('node-fetch'); // After Node 18 async function getData() const res = await fetch('https://api.example.com/data'); const data = await res.json(); console.log(data); No more jest