To give early deployers enough time to update if they’re not running Tutor we’re more officially deprecating support fore older versions of languages/tools/libraries that might have operational impact.
To that end, edx-platform will be dropping support for Node 18 in 6 months, see the DEPR for more details: [DEPR]: Node 18 - edx-platform · Issue #35015 · openedx/edx-platform · GitHub
edx-platform is running tests on both Node 18 and 20 so operators should be able to switch the the new version as of Today
If you have concerns on the schedule please chime in on the ticket, the change is not optional but the schedule for when to drop support can still change. The schedule will be finalized when the DEPR is accepted on 2024-07-04T04:00:00Z.