totally get that!
it is my 4th time that I gave up on trying fixing dependencies and startet off with a blank ionic app and migrated everything in there.
Upgrades to newer version, at least for me, cost me too much time. As much as an effort it is to migrate, this is still SO MUCH LESS work to me.
Still it might just be my case since I might have a too complex app (tinder, whatsapp, twitter and instragram clone with additional music capabilities so lots of plugins and dependencies)
On the other hand, I am still grateful for ionic, since I would have never been able to pull of such a big project with me being a onemanarmy.
so no thanks to npm dependency management and all the thanks to the ionic team 