I can't vouch much but I have used NPM but not to that 'final state' and yet to explore it but I use Python and Django. It sounds like their might be a redirect in place in the settings that might be causing this? Can't be 100% sure but sounds like the same issue I had with my own cms in development currently in the urls, thats if you have a 'settings url' file, might differ for react!
I've heard the documentations quite good for Digital Ocean, so you might need to refer to the documentation :)