Accessing non-existent property 'padLevels' of module exports inside circular dependency

[castortech]

running grunt-init gruntfile results in:

Please answer the following:
[?] Is the DOM involved in ANY way? (Y/n) (node:30284) Warning: Accessing non-existent property 'padLevels' of module exports inside circular dependency
(Use node --trace-warnings ... to show where the warning was created)

Using the ? results in:
?
Fatal error: util.error is not a function

Please help, I have just installed latest grunt-cli (1.4.3) and made sure to upgrade npm (10.1.0), node (20.7.0)