While working on resolving this today it occurred to me that the most recent (and only) Sage Theme I built was on my Mac. So I never encountered the note about installing NodeJS using sudo.
I completely reinstalled my Linux Ubuntu GNOME OS and dove straight into setting up this particular site I’m currently working on to see if I got any different result.
So I researched nvm and discovered that it specifically installs NodeJS / NPM without using sudo. I followed these instructions specifically and was successful in doing that.
Then I re-ran npm install in my Theme directory and it ran successfully without error.
So then I went back to run my deploy (the original issue) and I get this.
So, I can’t exactly say this issue is resolved because I am getting stopped immediately after running my deploy. But npm install is working so I’m assuming if I resolve this issue then this topic will be able to be resolved.