The co-author for this approach, who did a lot of the heavy lifting, is the very talented Nate Ferrero.
We recently found another speed bump as we carefully drove down our path to removing require.js in favor of Angular purity. We found hidden dependencies nestled into the code. Code development of any substantial kind that lives for any substantial amount of time with multiple developers quickly gains warts.
Recently at the office, we have been removing Require.js from our base architecture and going as much Angular native as possible. This has been an extremely interesting exercise. One issue that become apparent immediately was code organization. Most code was loading as the callback function to a Require define block. With the define block gone, the scope suddenly went global and code that had been lumped together for Require callbacks no longer needed to cohabitate. The new challenge was how to organize code and keep global scope clean.