Usually, when something works interactively, but not as a grid job, this is due to the job running out of memory as the default limit (256 MByte) is often insufficient and some programs have a very confusing way to report this resource deficit. Could you please try starting the job with -mem 512M, -mem 1G, etc. to see if that solves the issue?

Yes, this seemed to work:

jstart -N anon -mem 1g /usr/bin/node anon/anon.js --config /data/project/anon/config.json --verbose

honestly, I had no idea that it was using that much memory. Is it ok to run bot jobs that use that much memory?

In general, that is not a problem. If your jobs were continuously using hundreds of gigabytes, there would need to be a discussion if your tool/bot could be optimized or new hardware resources must be added (or, absolute worst case, the tool/bot be disabled if the other options are not feasible), but 1 GByte is usually far below the radar.