Best way to use Lingui (with macros) in a plain node project

[Bertg]

We have a simple node project that we use to send push notifications. This is basically a worker process consuming a queue, and sending out HTTP calls to google/apple with the message we want to display on the user's phone.

Obviously we want this translated.
Obviously we want this with Lingui.
Obviously we want the macro syntax.

We got it to work with babel, but it is very fragile (v5 -> v6 update was painful).

What is the best practices to use Lingui in a bare bones setup? Do the maintainers want to support this (or at least document some best practices around this).

Open for discussion, and see how you solved it.