As per previous comments, this process appears to be fairly sensitive to the versions of nodejs and windows-build-tools that are used. Using the latest and greatest versions of these packages (as of April 2021) does not work. I have successfully used the following commands to get an operational installation. These steps explicitly specify older versions where needed :
choco install rsync -y
choco install nodejs-lts --version=10.24.1 -y
npm install --production windows-build-tools --vs2015
npm install -g gulp
npm install -g lithium-sdk
