some packages ship with pre-built versions of binaries for the most popular platforms (eg serialport) - so don't need tools - but if there is a combination they don't have (or there is no prebuild) then they have to be built - eg serialport on Armv6 for Pi - so it is entirely possible that this package may have shipped node10 binary but not yet node12 - etc.
( this is the the main long standing reason we recommended the LTS versions of Node.js ).
Our windows install docs do talk about how to install tools if anyone reads down that far.
