I feel like the point of the article isn't so much "how do I solve this specific issue" as "this is the general state of JS packaging", and the solution you present doesn't work in the general case of larger, less trivial dependencies
But the thing is, the general problem of packaging is a complicated system, and the current solution developed are there to solve those complications (which adds more complications unfortunately).
However, the article wasn't about this general problem of package management. It's a problem of somebody wanting to test out some code, and went down the rabbit hole without understanding what they're doing (not a slight at them - it's hard to know what to do).
Ideally, you don't go down that route, because testing out some code doesn't require solving the packaging problem.
