If you need to strip a lot of boilerplate and modify the code of a large framework in order for you to use it enjoyably, maybe you should look into different frameworks instead? Perhaps a microframework.
I think you misunderstood the article. There is no stripping of any boilerplate, but rather converting the existing project to how meteor runs itself as a native node.js application, in order to run it in production. That way, you can use a number of other tools to keep it running (forever), to load balance it with other instances (http-proxy) or monitor it (newrelic).