Quick update.
Yeah, downloading mcp23017chip, changing "i2c-bus": "~1.2.2"
to "i2c-bus": "~5.2.1"
and installing it locally via npm i /path/to/mcp23017chip
did the thing. All is working good now
Also, I'll check the Python script pushing updates to MQTT way. No polling sounds more sense here.
Thanks