It would allow to distribute and package the library simply, rather than having to checkout the library in the other projects dir and have weird require(../../lib/module/other)
We must be doing different things. If I start getting relative paths like that, I usually pull it out into a separate module.
I can understand bundling a bunch of modules together for UMD builds, but if you need to bundle all of your NPM/browserifiable modules for other browserify apps, you are probably going about it the wrong way..