FWIW I tried switching a fairly large project from Jest to Vitest, hoping for performance improvements. Instead I got some inscrutable errors about circular dependencies.

More generally this is one of the really annoying things about Node.js. You might have some circular dependency that works everywhere, but it fails when you use some specific bundler or test runner. Cause they all handle things slightly differently.

Circular dependencies almost always end up causing trouble *eventually* because the body of one of the modules involved has to be evaluated first (when the other participants in the cycle aren't a fully operational battlestation yet).

I've used p3rl.org/circular::require on perl projects before now to root out such dependencies and kill them with fire, and "figure out how to get equivalent technology in TS/JS codebases" is on my list of things to do.

Fundamentally, a circular dependency that currently (apparently) "works everywhere" should still be treated as an unexploded footbomb.

Excising them can absolutely be annoying and inconvenient, but IME not nearly as much as having the damn thing go off when a future maintainer makes an innocuous change an indeterminate amount of time later.

tl;dr: HUMBUG (and sorry I don't have a better answer yet)