Can you add the lines
const gte_Date = new Date( startDate ) ;
const lt_Date = new Date( endDate ) ;
just before
and replace
with
$gte : gte_Date ,
$lt : lt_Date ,
If that still fails, I suspect you need to import or require so that you refer to same Date type as the one used by mongoose schema.
By the way your $or is useless since you have a single object/condition inside its array.