No, you are right (except for a typo, the double Y). I would have been just as surprised and as frustrated as you if I saw what you are seeing! Except for the minor typo in the (esoteric and not well known) environmental variable, you are doing everything right. Hopefully it would work after fixing the typo.
As to why you as a user have to bother with even knowing about this esoteric variable: I am seconding Ralph’s suggestion and explanation. Julia is expected to obey linker overrides like the LD_LIBRARY_PATH (and probably a bunch others that I do not know about), so when such an override is set to point to an incompatible library version, all julia can do is complain and shut down.
Given the propensity of well meaning but misleadingly configured modules systems on HPC services, it might be worth it to have better error messages when things like this happen. After all, it would be really nice if the error message is “For some reason, probably related to how your computing environment is set up, Julia was asked to use an incompatible version of so-and-so. If this was a misconfiguration, please stop commanding Julia to use an incompatible version by removing the SOME_ENV_VARIABLE override.”
Edit: Pointing the sysadmin to this thread and Ralph’s comment would probably help them with fixing the issue. Unless some specific module is loaded, there really should be no active LD_LIBRARY_PATH overrides. Hopefully they will not be too annoyed at our dislike for module systems (we know that everyone has different, slightly contradictory needs).
Edit 2: I submitted a issue on github about having clearer error messages in such a situation. I doubt it is something that would be considered a high priority or addressed anytime soon (after all, it is a misconfigured system, not a problem with julia proper), but it is probably a configuration issue that julia can detect and warn about.