Webpack: resolve transitive dependencies of linked modules

Question

I'm trying to implement a node module which should be installable on another module and be responsible to bundle it into a react app for me. (similar to create react app)

A simplified proof of concept can be found here

example is an hello world module.

example depends from bundler which uses webpack+babel to bundle example into an app.

Currently running npm run build on example results into an error as webpack is not able to resolve react and react-dom which are transitive dependencies present in bundler

Running npm run build on example works as intended if bundler is installed via an npm pack instead of a local path such as

"devDependencies": {
  "bundler": "../bundler"
}

because during the installation npm lifts the transitive dependencies inside example/node_module (this doesn't happen when installing from a local path like I currently do)

I'm aware I could add the following config to webpack to "fix the issue":

resolve: {
  modules: [
    'node_modules',
    'node_modules/bundler/node_modules'
  ],
},

But in my opinion this is not a real solution because if example depends on another local module example2 webpack would then fail to resolve transitive dependencies coming from example2 and another resolve.modules entry would need to be added.

Is there a way to make this work keeping the modules separate and not nested?