It's not easy to guess what it could be with your small code snipped. Require is only needed if the used library export only in CommonJs (outdated) instead of ES6.

I was looking in the https://www.npmjs.com/package/google-auth-library docu it seems that many examples here are with require but one is with import

import { AwsClient, AwsSecurityCredentials, AwsSecurityCredentialsSupplier, ExternalAccountSupplierContext } from 'google-auth-library';

So the import shouldnt be a problem. Can you share more of your code ? Or even better a playground in stackblitz - sometimes it can even help to debug the issue yourself while creating a isolated stackblitz version.