ng serve suddenly not working

In setting up .NET Core 2, I seem to have sabotaged the Angular CLI. When I try to run the npm start command to spin up an app I get an error telling me that ng serve ain't there. Following somewhat what is suggested partway down this thread but also doing my own thing a little bit I fixed the problem by destroying outright my node_modules folder and then running these commands:

1. npm uninstall -g angular-cli @angular/cli
2. npm install -g @angular/cli
3. npm install --save-dev @angular/cli
4. npm install @angular/cli
5. npm install