Yea. The handlebars part was an unneeded detail.

I think compiled functions should work by running them (even after saving
them as strings into files and losing scope, etc) with only a MessageFormat
runtime as a single global (or module). It shouldn't require a packaged
build in that manner. It trades a tiny bit of space for a lot of output
flexibility. The new version I think breaks all current integrations I've
done because of the way I precompile (I've never actually used the command
line tool outside of testing it). So I'd be excited to fix it.