Providing an update: The node-sass installation failure was due to a corporate proxy preventing the binary from downloading. Once that was resolved, I was able to install the simple react panel locally. However, after restarting grafana-server did not see the plugin listed in the console plugin list. I shared the results from that issue in a new post shown here if you had any thoughts:
Unfortunately the original npx command to create a plugin still has the same error with node-sass even with node-sass installed globally.