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
Probably some caching issue/race condition in portage...
As an example, here are the versions of firefox, nodejs, and openssl installed on my system:
I have the same nodejs version and firefox version as you, but neither of them require openssl 1.x.