Bandwagon.fm is a great project, but unfortunately, ActivityPub/Federation is not yet reliably implemented and has too many bugs.
For example, if you follow a Pixelfed account and then unfollow, the follow remains on Pixelfed!
In my opinion, the ActivityPub part of bandwagon.fm is unfortunately not yet production-ready and should be tested and fixed more thoroughly.
You can use pnpm instead of npm. pnpm has a "Delay dependency updates" feature where you can install package versions that are x old only.
See https://pnpm.io/supply-chain-security#delay-dependency-updates
Edit: I just found out, that this can also be specified in npm and yarn: https://gist.github.com/mcollina/b294a6c39ee700d24073c0e5a4e93104