There's a tradeoff here, which is that you'll have to stick to a strict subset of conventional Node. Not just the builtin libraries (fine, that's expected), but

There's a tradeoff here, which is that you'll have to stick to a strict subset of conventional Node. Not just the builtin libraries (fine, that's expected), but basic conventions. For instance, your approach doesn't support assigning to `module.exports` (just a few more lines of code), relative paths (a few dozen more lines), or the path resolution used by `require.resolve` (a few dozen more). For small apps it's probably fine, and I've used something very similar. But it's not always easy to decide "this will be a small app" up front. And then there's the issue that even if your app is small, `require` will be doing something very different in Node (complex path resolution) than in the browser, and it could lead to confusing results or a lying test suite.