Either my if statement or parameter doesn't work

Helloo! I have been trying to make a Walmart stock monitor, but I ran into an issue, but realized that redirecting to the desired link again fixes the issue therefore in my code. I try to catch the error that lets me identify the error and then run the original function again, but with the parameter that sets a=1 so that it triggers the if statement causing it to refresh to go to the desired page and check stock again, but its not working how I desired, it appears that the parameter a always gets set to 0 and I have no clue why, id gladly appreciate any help !

const core = require('puppeteer-core');

async function init(a) {
  let b = a;
  console.log(b);
  const browser = await core.launch({
    executablePath: '/Program Files/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe',
    headless: false,
    defaultViewport: null,
    args: [
      '--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4430.212 Safari/537.36',
      '--accept-language=en-US,en;q=0.9',
      '--sec-fetch-site=none',
    ],
  });

  const page = (await browser.pages())[0];

  await page.goto(
    'https://www.walmart.com/ip/POP-Rocks-BTS-Jungkook/406893736'
  );
  if (a == 1) {
    reload(page);
    stockChecker();
    console.log(a);
  } else {
    console.log(`testing...${a}`);
    stockChecker(page);
    console.log('LfdlA');
  }
}

async function stockChecker(page) {
  let stock = await page.evaluate(() => {
    let in_out_of_stock = document.querySelector(
      'link[itemprop="availability"]'
    ).href;

    return in_out_of_stock;
  });

  let seller = await page.evaluate(() => {
    let seller = document.querySelector('.seller-name').innerText;
    return seller;
  });

  if (
    stock.toLowerCase().includes('instock') &&
    seller.toLowerCase().includes('walmart')
  ) {
    return console.log('in stock');
  } else {
    return console.log('out of stock');
  }
}

async function reload(page) {
  await page.goto(
    'https://www.walmart.com/ip/POP-Rocks-BTS-Jungkook/406893736'
  );
}

async function run() {
  let a = 0;
  try {
    await init(a);
  } catch (e) {
    if (e.toString().toLowerCase().includes("'href' of null")) {
      a = 1;
      init(a);
      console.log(a);
    } else {
      console.log(e.toString());
    }
  }
}

run(); 

Also I am very new to using puppeteer if you recommend any other web automation frameworks that are better in terms of speed / effectiveness or see any ways for me to refactor my code id gladly appreciate that as well comrades.