Do we really need module federation plugins for various frontend tooling ( e.g. vite, webpack etc)?

[koyadume]

I have been trying to implement micro app architecture for my side project for some time. Difference between micro app and micro frontend architectures is that in micro app architecture both host application and remote modules are written using same client side framework (vuejs in my case) and host application is having no reference to remote modules in any of its config (e.g. vite.config.js) files.

I was able to achieve this without any special plugin with vue cli and vue 2 and wrote about it in detail in this SO answer.

Tried to implement same using vite and vue3 but ran into some issues which I have highlighted vitejs/vite#12291.

So I am just wondering if module federation plugins are really required to implement true micro frontend ( aka micro app ) architecture or I am doing something wrong.