Bump to Node LTS

[gfarb]

• Upgrade to Node LTS (and use .nvmrc)
• Remove redundant Node module installations
• Clean up Compile Release Notes & Delete Artifacts steps in .github/workflows/release-branch-merge-handler.yml
• Fix bugs in Codespaces setup script i,e bug preventing installation of plugins & removal of node_modules to prevent error on rebuild

[rdietrick]

Looks good to me, @gfarb .

Have we tested all of these changes? We should think about ways to automatically test all of the workflows as a PR validating check. We'd probably need to do it in a fork, so that we could create our own environments in which to test everything.

[gfarb]

Looks good to me, @gfarb .

Have we tested all of these changes? We should think about ways to automatically test all of the workflows as a PR validating check. We'd probably need to do it in a fork, so that we could create our own environments in which to test everything.

@rdietrick yeah tested all of them in my fork, albeit that was a while ago it may be a good idea to run through another round of testing. I think I also need to look at dependencies and make sure they are all updated to avoid security "issues".

I think that would be awesome if we could somehow create a validating check, will start to think about how we can accomplish this.

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Update:

Before merging in this change in, I actually want to move forward with this PR #58 because this was tested a lot more extensively and is a bit more important