I’m following this tutorial, but I keep running into problems, perhaps because that the tutorial was made with an older version of Unity?
I’m using version 2021.3.15f1 right now.
Is it best to use the version of Unity that’s in the tutorial?
Unfortunately the answer is yes. In my direct repeated experience (with SEVERAL Unity demos), most Unity demos generally break the moment you try another version than they were made for.
Unfortunately even though they usually break in trivial ways (such as missing layers, missing EventSystems, null references, just really simple stuff), the people those demos are targeted at are not equipped to reason about what is going wrong because they just got started!
Here are four non-Unity content-makers. I recommend checking some of them out, perhaps coming back to the Unity examples once you are familiar enough with the engine to fix them.
Imphenzia / imphenzia - super-basic Unity tutorial:
Jason Weimann:
Brackeys super-basic Unity Tutorial series:
Sebastian Lague Intro to Game Development with Unity and C#:
Tutorials and example code are great, but keep this in mind to maximize your success and minimize your frustration:
How to do tutorials properly, two (2) simple steps to success:
Step 1. Follow the tutorial and do every single step of the tutorial 100% precisely the way it is shown. Even the slightest deviation (even a single character!) generally ends in disaster. That’s how software engineering works. Every step must be taken, every single letter must be spelled, capitalized, punctuated and spaced (or not spaced) properly, literally NOTHING can be omitted or skipped.
Fortunately this is the easiest part to get right: Be a robot. Don’t make any mistakes.
BE PERFECT IN EVERYTHING YOU DO HERE!!
If you get any errors, learn how to read the error code and fix your error. Google is your friend here. Do NOT continue until you fix your error. Your error will probably be somewhere near the parenthesis numbers (line and character position) in the file. It is almost CERTAINLY your typo causing the error, so look again and fix it.
Step 2. Go back and work through every part of the tutorial again, and this time explain it to your doggie. See how I am doing that in my avatar picture? If you have no dog, explain it to your house plant. If you are unable to explain any part of it, STOP. DO NOT PROCEED. Now go learn how that part works. Read the documentation on the functions involved. Go back to the tutorial and try to figure out WHY they did that. This is the part that takes a LOT of time when you are new. It might take days or weeks to work through a single 5-minute tutorial. Stick with it. You will learn.
Step 2 is the part everybody seems to miss. Without Step 2 you are simply a code-typing monkey and outside of the specific tutorial you did, you will be completely lost. If you want to learn, you MUST do Step 2.
Of course, all this presupposes no errors in the tutorial. For certain tutorial makers (like Unity, Brackeys, Imphenzia, Sebastian Lague) this is usually the case. For some other less-well-known content creators, this is less true. Read the comments on the video: did anyone have issues like you did? If there’s an error, you will NEVER be the first guy to find it.
Beyond that, Step 3, 4, 5 and 6 become easy because you already understand!
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Is there any chance that any of these tutorials might be updated soon?
Don’t expect them to. The old videos float to the top of search results and gain the clicks, which is the point in investing in creating the tutorials. Maybe check the comments for recent ones that might point to errors and fixes?
TBH though, learning how to solve issues is fundamental to gamedev. You will have errors and you will have to learn how to work around them. ‘First steps’ where the first steps don’t actually work as intended is a pretty realistic introduction to real gamedev. That frustration and confusion is part of the experience and it’s maybe even best to get it early on to decide if gamedev is really for you. If the tutorials just work no faults, you’ll be given a false impression of what gamedev entails. 
The bit no-one expects is stuff that used to work breaking. It’s like speaking English where the meaning of the words keep changing but no-one tells you what’s changed. You start writing a book only to find it starts saying completely different things and you have to change it to correct it. Eventually, you learn how to write in ways to avoid word-changes, but that’s part of the growth process.
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It seems like the tutorial was made for Unity version 2019.3. I had a look in this archive, and there are multiple versions of Unity 2019.3.
Which one should I get?
The latest 2019 should do the work is my guess. Usually is rare to break between 2019 versions and last one would have the most fixes.
I would start by import the tutorial to the Unity the tutorial was made in, verify it works and make a copy of the project and update to 2021.3, then work on that in parallel with working one to fix it for 2021.
It is much easier when have something working directly accessible for reference, to fix issues on the other side.
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I installed the latest release of version 2019.3. It says that the tutorial isn’t available in this version? I thought that the tutorial was made for this version of Unity.
It also says that the earliest version of Unity where the tutorial is available, is version 2020 LTS.
So I installed the latest release of that version instead.