Critical dependency: require function is used in a way in which dependencies cannot be statically extracted

[vladmandic]

WebPack version 5 changed how it handles dynamic imports

FaceAPI library itself does not use dynamic imports, but bundled TensorFlow/JS in face-api.esm.js includes some additional platform-specific capabilities
For example, WASM binaries can be loaded using filesystem read file calls, but only when platform is NodeJS

Presence of those dynamic capabilities detection calls causes WebPack to misinterpret type of a library used and generate warning messages:

WARNING in ./node_modules/@vladmandic/human/dist/face-api.esm.js 13:11-18
Critical dependency: require function is used in a way in which dependencies cannot be statically extracted

Note that this is NOT AN ERROR, but simply a WebPack warning that can be safely ignored.

However, if you want to eliminate such warnings,
solution is to explicitly specify in WebPack configuration that Human is an ESM library:

in webpack.config.js add:

module.exports = {
  module: {
    rules: [
      { test: /face-api.esm.js/, type: 'javascript/esm' },
    ],
  },
}

Note that WebPack is internally used by many frameworks and location of the config file may differ between frameworks (React, Angular, Vue, Next, etc.)

To see how to modify WebPack configuration in cases when non-default configuration files are used, check framework specific documentation.

[ljnferreira]

Thanks for the presented solution, it worked fine for the problem I was trying to solve on my project!