Protobuf: Uncaught reference error: exports is not defined

I'm trying to get protobuf to run in typescript.

The official Google Documentation says to simply use npm install google-protobuf and then to require('google-protobuf').

I'm unexperienced with npm, so I ran into several problems there. First of all, require('google-protobuf') returned an error 404, because the file was not found. I instead opted to require the file manually, so I sourced it in my index.html:

<script src="node_modules/google-protobuf/google-protobuf.js"></script>

This should work right? What instead happens is that I get an Uncaught reference error: exports is not defined. How do I even begin to debug this? I tried to take a look at the google-protobuf.js file and found a few exports statements, but I don't know what I'm expected to do here.

If it helps at all, here is my tsconfig.json file:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es5",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "moduleResolution": "node",
    "sourceMap": true,
    "emitDecoratorMetadata": true,
    "experimentalDecorators": true,
    "removeComments": false,
    "noImplicitAny": false
  },
  "exclude": [
    "node_modules",
    "typings/main",
    "typings/main.d.ts"
  ]
}