Ah, thank you - I misunderstood the crucial piece "load AMD modules like ... they were native Node modules".
I guess I can see the value in this, if you're retrofitting a new module in the AMD style to an existing node application which does not use that style.
The requirejs module has both the server-side loading modules and the optimizer that compiles to a single file whereas this new one only does the server-side loading of modules as far as I can tell.