“And I don’t feel I did a good job communicating the frustration he went through in the one hour or so until he gave up.”
A strong computer scientist tried to call one function from one GitHub package. ES module flags, Node’s path resolution, MIME type errors and syntax errors from inside the package ate an hour, and he quit. The person helping him does usability research at MIT. If the expert and the guide both fail, the tooling is the problem.