When you're talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don't like to be treated poorly.
Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.
Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.
Actually a huge part of debugging is just figuring out where the problem is, so even if your fix isn’t great, you’ve still done a large portion of the work. I always appreciate pull requests, even if I ultimately don’t accept them. The fact that someone else is thinking about how to improve the project is always helpful.