How to make webpack ignore a require to a mising file in a npm module?

When bundling my project with webpack, I encountered an error message indicating that a .node file required in one of my npm package does not exist.

After searching for a while, I believe that the missing file is actually not used by the package because

1. it is required conditionally and
2. the condition never happens

In conclusion, it should be safe to ignore the require statement. However, since the package is not written by me, I cannot simply remove that line of code. (a package upgrade in some other day will revert it)
How can I instruct webpack to ignore that require?

I have tried the following things:

1. Exclude file (another stackoverflow Q&A). Not sure if I got the idea of this answer. I excluded the file in one of the module rules but webpack still tried to load the missing file. I guess exclude merely prevents the file getting transformed but not loaded.
2. Externalize file (also a stackoverflow Q&A). Adding this line of code to my webpack config externals: /path\/to\/missing\/file$/i, I encountered a different error message when running webpack: ERROR in main.js from Terser. Unexpected token: expand (...). I got no idea how to solve it.