A lot of people are questioning the value of using nvm in CI, but I think the main reason is just that the .nvmrc file is shared between dev/CI. It's a minor benefit, but still nice.

That said, rtx is so much simpler for this:

    curl https://rtx.pub/rtx-latest-linux-x64 > /usr/bin/rtx
    rtx install
    rtx x -- npm install
    rtx x -- npm run test

it'll automatically use the .nvmrc/.node-version file. If developers want to use nvm locally, they still can.