NPM has removed the "bin" command in version 9.0

[al2o3cr]

original discussion on the forums

VegaLite.Export uses the npm bin command to find where to look for executables, but that subcommand was removed in NPM 9.0:

npm/cli#5459

but then there was some concern that the PR author's assumptions (like "the global bin location is always where node is") aren't true across platforms, so now there's an RFC to re-add npm bin but only for the global case:

npm/rfcs#657

The simplest workaround would be to ensure that users are on NPM 8 or lower, but I don't know if that's an easy thing to enforce.

Long-term, the various NPM discussions linked above suggest that this should be using npm run or similar instead of manually searching for executables.