Get my Gulp properly setup on new installation

I took over a web site which uses a Gulp setup to preprocess (minify and clean, mostly) JS, CSS and images. It worked fine for 3 years. Recently my laptop died, so I am setting up on a new one. That means freshly installing Npm, Gulp, Node and other stuff. I at least discovered that I install older versions of these, because the latest ones show errors about my dependency on deprecated gulp-util. Older ones do not mind. But even so, now I can't get the gulp to work. It runs about one quarter of the tasks (30 seconds) and then stops. No files are produced. No clue that I can see. I doubt it is any problem with the source files themselves (eg a syntax failure in JS); I am pretty sure these files are not parsed for syntax. I believe the change lies in using a 2019 environment, where previously it was a 2015 environment. This happens even if I just process only css, only js or only images. That's where I'm stuck. I can't release any new work until I get past this. I will supply you with the few small gulpfiles which define the processing, a [login to view URL], and folders of the source files to be worked on by gulp. You won't need to know anything about my website , you won't need any PHP, you won't need to get the website running. This is just to fix a development tool in your own folder. If you succeed, you'll probably tell me to install specific versions of some items, maybe change the gulpfiles. You won't need to change the source files, I believe.