I generaly don't bother reporting errors like this, I just fix it locally and push things into my overlay/forks and I'm done with it.

It might be your local ebuilds that are the cause of your problem.

As an example, here are the versions of firefox, nodejs, and openssl installed on my system:

  $ eix -I  --format '<installedversions:EQNAMEVERSION>' nodejs -o firefox -o dev-libs/openssl
  =dev-libs/openssl-3.1.2
  =net-libs/nodejs-20.5.1
  =www-client/firefox-102.15.0

I have the same nodejs version and firefox version as you, but neither of them require openssl 1.x.

It seems like portage did remember that those packages were built against that openssl version - when running as "emerge -DavuUN @world @system --changed-deps" the problem went away :-)

Probably some caching issue/race condition in portage...