The Engine “Node” is Incompatible… What Now?

You have create-react-app fired up and it’s doing its thing. Packages resolved and fetched and it looks like smooth sailing from here when all the sudden…

error postcss@8.1.9: The engine “node” is incompatible with this module. Expected version “^10 || ^12 || >=14”. Got “13.14.0”
error Found incompatible module.

Your node version may not be exactly 13.14.0, but the premise is the same: “Sorry, we can’t do this because your package is too outdated. Figure it out or suffer the consequences, ya loser.”

No biggies, you’re no loser, you know how to update your node package (and perhaps you’ve installed node with homebrew or nvm) so you run brew upgrade node or nvm install node (or whatever the command is that you need to use) but still, after running node -v you get the same gosh darn version!!! What’s going on?

You run brew upgrade node or nvm install node again because, “Maybe it didn’t work the first time!” but you’re wrong. All you get is an error:
Warning: node 15.3.0 already installed

Uh… what?

It turns out, node links stuff magically behind the scenes and something has gone awry. It’s likely not your fault! Before continuing on, we want to make sure you’re using the correct node location by running which node and…