We should not be skipping pkglocks if they fail to parse -- I think a better patch here is to go into lib/utils/parse-json.js and make it use json-parse-better-errors, which is what we use in other parts of the CLI to output more informative parse errors.

Could you send that patch in, instead? You'll have to rewrite this anyway, because npm@5.7.0 added support for automatic git conflict resolution for pkglocks, so this code is a bit different now.

json-parse-better-errors

Adding a new package dependency wasn't something I was planning on doing for my first npm contribution, but cool!

@JoshuaKGoldberg it's not -quite- a new dependency. It's used a lot by npm's deps and I guess I'm actually surprised we don't have it as a toplevel dependency. Just make sure it's in bundleDependencies, too!

➜ npm i
npm ERR! Unexpected token { in JSON at position 104 while parsing near '...e,
npm ERR!   "dependencies" {
npm ERR!     "eggplant": {
npm ERR! ...'

I think this is a much nicer error (could be better, but better than "uh idk")