How to clean your Mac from excess software junk?

Question

macOS

Hello.
For five years I have been working as a layout designer in various projects - from Ruby on Rails and Node-JS to php projects. Many in parallel. A lot of code, packages, libraries, rights settings, configurations, server settings, and so on have passed through my Macbook for all the time.
I only occasionally did project setup - in most cases, programmers from the company I worked for helped install missing packages, libraries, and other things needed for the project to work through the console.
Over time, on my laptop, the number of problems and errors increased when installing the next tool ( for example, this ).
I can’t vouch for the skill of programmers, so I sin that my MacBook just overflowed with excess garbage and everything left over from old projects. And it is this garbage that prevents me from fully understanding and interacting with brew, node, npm, webpack, postgres and other terrible things on my own.
How can you quickly and easily clean up your OS X from this garbage? Reinstalling the system? Will she help? Or will it not affect these installed system files? What's the best way to do it?

Answer 1

It will help, but it would be better to format the disk and install a clean system - five years is a long time for an OS.

Answer 2

1. Think over the architecture (yes, this is the word) and development methodology on a laptop.
Do not litter the system with a variety of software, but use management tools, be it Docker, virtualization systems, or something else to your taste.
2. Reinstall the system from scratch. You can choose the OS version yourself.
3. Stick to the chosen methodology
Then your OS will not be clogged with different versions of the software used and there will be no library conflicts.