this is awesome to wake up to, thank you both for your investigation.

ok I've sunk another hour into this and made no great inroads D:
What I've tried:

• pinned ssb-ref @ ~12.2.0 (so minor range is pinned)
  • ssb-schema-defintions, ssb-gathering-schema, scuttle-gathering, patchbay-gatherings all fixed
  • installing newest updated
  • here's some of the results of npm ls ssb-ref in patchbay:

patchbay@7.15.1 /home/mix/projects/SSBC/patchbay
─┬ patch-inbox@1.2.0
│ └── ssb-ref@2.13.4  deduped
...
├─┬ patchbay-gatherings@3.2.5
│ ├─┬ scuttle-gathering@1.3.3
│ │ └── ssb-ref@2.12.2 
│ └─┬ ssb-gathering-schema@1.2.2
│   ├── ssb-ref@2.12.2 
│   └─┬ ssb-schema-definitions@1.1.1
│     └── ssb-ref@2.12.2 
...

I can confirm that npm linking patchbay-gatherings in does still work. So... I'm guessing ssb-ref seems not to be the culprit? because everything related to gatherings has the older version of ssb-ref (I checked by looking in node_modules to be absolutely sure) (Is something going horridlbly wrong with node / npm... surely not?)