We're currently on Puppeteer 4 (Chromium 83), which seems to have some difficulty installing itself on Debian Buster / Node 10 / npm 7. It worked fine on npm 6.
The upgrade to npm was accidental, because the quibble-buster docker image forgot to pin the npm.git checkout version (details at T292684), and should be fixed soon by either restoring the npm version and ultimately by upgrading to Node 12 proper.
Meanwhile, @hashar and I reproduced the issue both locally on a clean install, so Quibble itself, nor the Docker image around it isn't part of the problem, it's purely a puppeteer<>npm problem. My bet is on the lock file format since it seems to work fine when I bypass the lock file.
We're overdue for a general release and upgrade of puppeteer and Chromium so I'll just do that at the same time as all the other overhead with a release and pull throughs, tracking on this task.