Thanks for sharing @nroose. BAsed on the information you provided, it seems like we could possibly drop Yarn 1 in future major versions of the Node orb, does that seem acceptable to you?
For a workaround, what you are showing there is actually more or less exactly what we would change to the orb as well. I believe we originally were pulling from GitHub releases to ensure a version number, but that is subject to change and cause issues like you saw here, installing via NPM may be more reliable as it self-installs.