[Tainnor]

Yes, node's attempt to include lockfiles is botched, unfortunately. Not only are there UX issues (it's completely unintuitive that you should be using "npm ci", for example), but the lock file can also get corrupted e.g. during a merge conflict and npm performs no sanity checking on it.

I once had a case where a build was suddenly failing. The reason turned out to be that (for whatever reason) a dev had managed to corrupt the lock file, probably during a merge conflict, in such a way that the entry for package A actually contained the URL for package B. It turns out that npm didn't realise that this was inconsistent (with the package.json, and with the npm registry) and downloaded package B but exported it as package A, making the error incredibly hard to pin down.