nodejs install through anaconda causing cross machine compatibility issues on linux - node.js

Question

This problem may be hard to reproducibly describe but hopefully this works. I'm using two different machines (laptop and desktop), and following the steps below on both.
I am creating a conda environment like this:
conda create --name webdev --no-default-packages
Then I am only installing nodejs at the moment, like this:
conda install -c conda-forge nodejs
The resulting environment has only three things in it:
# Name Version Build Channel
libgcc-ng 7.2.0 hdf63c60_3 conda-forge
libstdcxx-ng 7.2.0 hdf63c60_3 conda-forge
nodejs 10.8.0 hfc679d8_1 conda-forge
Just to illustrate, I can then create a new react project like this:
create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
npm start
And the web server starts just fine and everything functions as expected. The problem I then have is that if I use my laptop to navigate into the project folder I created on my desktop and try npm start (or vice versa) I get the following error:
internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:583
throw err;
^
Error: Cannot find module '../scripts/start'
at Function.Module._resolveFilename (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:581:15)
at Function.resolve (internal/modules/cjs/helpers.js:30:19)
at Object.<anonymous> (/home/me/my-app/node_modules/.bin/react-scripts:35:25)
at Module._compile (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:689:30)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:700:10)
at Module.load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:599:32)
at tryModuleLoad (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:538:12)
at Function.Module._load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:530:3)
at Function.Module.runMain (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:742:12)
at startup (internal/bootstrap/node.js:266:19)
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! my-app#0.1.0 start: `react-scripts start`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Failed at the my-app#0.1.0 start script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.
npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR! /home/me/.npm/_logs/2018-11-21T01_24_45_031Z-debug.log
Strangely enough I can export the conda environment I created on my desktop, use it to create a new environment on my laptop, and will still get the error when I try to run the project I created on my desktop (and vice versa).