The 'request' packages is not used?

[ip1981]

There is a dev dependency in package.json - "request": "=2.81.0", but I don't see it's used anywhere.

[bnoordhuis]

That's to pin down the version of request that's used by node-gyp. There was a change in request@2.82.0 that breaks old Node.js versions. See commit 4525cbc.

As a node-gyp maintainer, I'd say depending on a specific version of node-gyp rather than what is shipped with npm is kind of an anti-pattern but hey.