This is because in the meantime Angular was upgraded. See ‘Upgrade angular version in UICommons’ here.
So basically this code works up to a certain version of UI Commons. I guess there would be no harm at making the change you suggested. OEUI’s POM should also stop depending on the distro. I mean all these things are the consequence of OEUI not being actively developed, as warned.
Translation: you should make a PR 
Altogether you should take the lead on OEUI and others will help you, rather than leaving “the main developer to decide”. This is a piece of work started by @darius that we took over briefly and discontinued, there is no main developer anymore behind it. And we have no plans to do anything with it in the foreseeable future.