Evaluate recent updates to Chalkbeat interactive template

[alykat]

https://dataviz.chalkbeat.org/2025/11/11/bug-fixes-and-performance-improvements.html

We'll want to keep LESS. Likely there will be impacts for how https://github.com/nprapps/scrolly-template is set up

[thomaswilburn]

Was thinking a little more about this--one idea that might make a lot of sense would be if the child template had the original as one of its dependencies in package.json (maybe as a git URL with a commit hash), and then load the base files from that node_modules subfolder. This would have some advantages, in that the child template would pin a parent template version, and then you wouldn't have to worry about the parent accidentally breaking the child until you went in and manually updated that dependency.

Technically, that would even work with the existing scrolly-template repo under grunt-init, so might be worth considering whether or not you end up pulling in the npm init initializer.