I tried a ton of potential solutions but im mostly sure the thing that did it was:

1- setting legacy-peer-deps to false npm config set legacy-peer-deps false
2- deleting node modules / package-lock
3- npm cache clean --force
4- npm install

verified the fix by creating a new debug-archive eas build:inspect --platform ios --stage archive --output ./debug-archive --profile development and running npm ci --include=dev, which ran successfully.