but nothing is showing. So it must be some environment thing but I don't know what

you could try explicitly setting

STD_CELL_LIBRARY

to a gf180 one like https://github.com/efabless/caravel_user_project/blob/fcfbe5d5f4081f289057d6c909b2570f12e6f282/openlane/user_project_wrapper/config.json#L73

it fails for the example project