Yeah,
didn't work. good news is I see that the maintainger of this node... ncd-red-comm.. just updated it 13 days ago.. so I shot him a message on github. This node is the basis for all other ncd node-red nodes as well, so maybe it will fix the ncd.mcp23008 issue too
The contrib-i2c and the contrib-ezo.. those use and underlying library called the i2c-bus and the author of that claims capability with node.js v16.. nevertheless, i sent messages to him as well.