Running Gitlab CI with selenium and firefox, getting WebDriverError: Process unexpectedly closed with status 1

I need to setup a simple CI configuration to run tests of a web app project. Currently, my test file looks like this:

import { promises as fsp } from "fs";
import { equal } from "assert";
import {
  Builder,
  Capabilities,
  // eslint-disable-next-line node/no-unpublished-import
} from "selenium-webdriver";

/* global describe, it, after */

async function takeScreenshot(driver, file) {
  const image = await driver.takeScreenshot();
  await fsp.writeFile(file, image, "base64");
}

describe("Selenium test", () => {
  const driver = new Builder().withCapabilities(Capabilities.firefox()).build();

  it("should go to google.com and check title", async () => {
    await driver.get("https://www.google.com");
    await takeScreenshot(driver, "test.png");
    const title = await driver.getTitle();
    equal(title, "Google");
  });

  after(() => driver.quit());
});

and I am using the following CI configuration

image: ubuntu

test:
  script:
    - apt update
    - apt install -y firefox npm xvfb
    - npm install
    - npm run lint
    - xvfb-run npm run test

where npm run lint simply executes npx eslint **/*.mjs and does not cause a problem.

All this produces the following error:

$ xvfb-run npm run test
> www@1.0.0 test
> node ./node_modules/mocha/bin/mocha --exit --timeout 10000
  Selenium test
    1) should go to google.com and check title
    2) "after all" hook for "should go to google.com and check title"
  0 passing (303ms)
  2 failing
  1) Selenium test
       should go to google.com and check title:
     WebDriverError: Process unexpectedly closed with status 1
      at Object.throwDecodedError (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/error.js:522:15)
      at parseHttpResponse (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/http.js:549:13)
      at Executor.execute (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/http.js:475:28)
      at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:97:5)
  2) Selenium test
       "after all" hook for "should go to google.com and check title":
     WebDriverError: Process unexpectedly closed with status 1
      at Object.throwDecodedError (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/error.js:522:15)
      at parseHttpResponse (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/http.js:549:13)
      at Executor.execute (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/http.js:475:28)
      at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:97:5)
Cleaning up project directory and file based variables
ERROR: Job failed: exit code 1

and I have no idea what I could do to fix this. I am not attached to the current configuration and in fact I think using an Ubuntu image might be a waste, but other things haven't worked for me either. If someone has a completely different configuration which will work with the attached test file then I will gladly adopt it.