the last step was the only thing to do.

I did a bunch of other stuff just to start clean, such as deleting the whole ‘node_modules’ folder using:

rm -r node_modules

Then ran npm install. Think that helped out to get rid of anything that could have been causing problems. Think I read this in another thread, but I’ll reiterate: Don’t run npm install in your /MagicMirror directory. Don’t know the exact reasoning, but I know that it messes things up (won’t confirm nor deny if I might have done that :grinning_squinting_face: )

Since I wasn’t getting all the package updates for some reason, I also enabled Universe repositories using

sudo add-apt-repository universe

which immediately fixed 3 package errors. After that, I did what @sdetweil recommended here:

cd ~/MagicMirror
rm -rf node_modules
rm package-lock.json
npm install

then for whatever module was causing problem

cd ~/MagicMirror/modules/modulename

do the same last 3 steps as above
AND THEN

npm install request --save

Again, thanks for the help! Hope I can also save someone some headache in the future, which is why I showed all my work here.