When you're talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don't like to be treated poorly.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.
That was less directed at you and more at the idea that just pinning versions solves the issue which is unfortunately very frequent among proponents of things like vendoring, nix, Docker containers and similar tools that allow a project to stay on an old version for potentially years. Sorry if that came across that way.