Comment 64 for bug 1794589

> Theoretically Canonical could upgrade bionic's nodejs to use the system's primary openssl.

This isn't possible. It would resurface bug 1779863. The nodejs version in Ubuntu Bionic requires a specific version of OpenSSL to remain compatible with external third party modules, since the version of OpenSSL used forms part of its ABI. Details in the other bug.

> As I understand, all of the packages listed above come from the Ubuntu repository (universe) - since this is an LTS release, shouldn't it be kept in a state where it's always possible to install two unrelated packages (here: libmysqlclient and nodejs) and they don't conflict with each other?

Ideally, yes, but due to the way Node upstream works (or at least, the way it did work at the time of the Node version in Bionic), this restriction exists.