npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory

[gtaillefer]

I'm going to repost this here from this topic on MediaWiki that I posted so I might get more answers
I tried installing both the translation-server and the zotero service from mediawiki via their git commands, and upon going in their respective directories, and trying to use npm install, they give me 100+ different versions of the same error:

npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory ...

For example one of the ones from translation-service:

npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, lstat '/home2/wwiiarch/translation-server/node_modules/.staging/core-js-f5f4dd1d/modules'
or
npm WARN tar ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home2/wwiiarch/zotero/node_modules/.staging/aws-sdk-acdb4433/clients/pricing.d.ts'

The common thing that I have found for both of these is that when I go into each node_modules directory, it shows that they're emtpy. This is despite the fact that none of the isntructions tell me anything about this, and just say to use the git command. However it seems that I use the npm commands its looking for a .staging folder inside node_modules.

My version of node is v10.24.1 (before I was trying v12.22.12 but it doesn't seem to change anything), and my version of npm is 6.14.16. I'm also on CentOS using Bluehost shared hosting.

How do I fix this problem? Thanks