Node error Cannot read property 'resolve' of undefined

I got into this situation with an old version of the n node version switcher (~v2), having switched onto Node v12. I was able to fix it by switching to a much older version of Node it had installed using n, v8 worked for me, and then upgrade the version switcher with sudo npm install -g n.

From there I could switch to any version of node and use npm again.

The reason for the error was probably conflicting global packages and node versions. I uninstalled node and npm and then reinstalled them.

To remove nodejs and associated packages (like npm):

sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove nodejs

Nodejs and npm will leave files in the system which may cause issues during reinstallation. I had to remove them as well.

Although it is a bad practice to remove packages manually (it may cause problems with the package manager), it helped my case. This answer shows how to remove nodejs and related files manually.

To reinstall them:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm