Thanks! I was looking at the ES imports you implemented in itables when writing Transpile (optional) TypeScript, support imports (package and relative) and schema by krassowski · Pull Request #28 · jupyterlab/jupyterlab-plugin-playground · GitHub. At the time you were using ESM.js which seems brilliant, but given that it is a relatively small player, I felt that relying on it for major deployments may not be a future-proof decision (just yet); even worse, they do not offer a way to verify SRI integrity as discussed in Support other loader mechanisms? · Issue #1 · jupyterlab/jupyterlab-plugin-playground · GitHub.
Long term we would like to purge require.js altogether (as it is not maintained anymore), but it is difficult due to number of users relying on it, so we would need to shim it. SystemJS might be the solution.