What are the current versions of tools that are recommended? Is there a place where it can be looked up?
Per Getting Started with Daml — Daml SDK 2.4.0 documentation, the current recommendation is Node 14.
The create-daml-app currently doesn’t work as-is with Node 16+. The fix is very minor and easy to apply, but also very non-obvious to find out (setting the env var NODE_OPTIONS to --openssl-legacy-provider at least for the npm start command).