How to resolve a stucked "file:" dependency in npm

In npm, after running the npm link command to enable your package to be linkable, it's possible to get stuck in a dependency hell, where in the dependency section of your package.json, you get

  "dependencies": {
    "your_package_name": "file:",
  },

This is where no matter what you try to do, "your_package_name": "file:" just wouldn't get removed from the dependencies.

I spent hours of research, and eventually found out that in order to remove this,

1. If you're running npm run dev, you have to stop or kill it, with Ctrl+C.
2. Delete the package-lock.json
3. Run npm remove -g your_package_name --save
4. Run npm uninstall your_package_name
5. Repeat 2-4 in any package that has "your_package_name": "file:"