Builds that set NODE_OPTIONS fail on macOS because Electron ignores it in the app's Node children #525

What happens

On macOS, "Apply and rebuild" on an older Gutenberg pull request (reproduced with gutenberg#76292, based on March 2026 trunk) fails with:

Build failed: Command failed: npm run --if-present --workspaces --silent build

--silent hides the real error. Without it, @wordpress/theme's build:tokens fails:

[ERROR:electron/shell/app/node_main.cc:153] Node.js environment variables are disabled because this process is invoked by other apps.
✗  [config] Cannot find module '.../packages/theme/bin/terrazzo-plugin-mode-overrides/index'

Why

• That script runs cross-env NODE_OPTIONS=--import=esbuild-esm-loader/register tz build --config terrazzo.config.ts, so tz needs the --import to load a .ts config.
• tz starts through our node shim, a bash script that execs the app binary with ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE=1.
• On macOS, Electron ignores NODE_OPTIONS when the process was launched by something outside the app. Its parent here is bash, so the --import is dropped.

Scope

• Not a regression from [Fix] Run Electron as Node through the Helper bundle on macOS so build workers leave the Dock alone #519: the main binary fails the same way as the Helper.
• The same build with the system node passes.
• Gutenberg trunk dropped NODE_OPTIONS from this script in af9f99d757 (Terrazzo 2.0, 17 Apr 2026), so only pull requests based on older trunk hit it.
• macOS only. Windows passes NODE_OPTIONS to children already (win-spawn-patch).

Proposed fix

On macOS, the node shim passes the incoming NODE_OPTIONS as CLI flags ahead of the script. Checked by hand on a copy of the site: with $NODE_OPTIONS before "$@" in the shim, the same build exits 0. Quoting inside NODE_OPTIONS needs care, plus tests in tests/unit/node-shims.test.cjs.

Found while testing #524.