I have spoken with many braintree employees (because many of them would just dance around the topic) and finally came to the understanding that the braintree node package was just not written for the ionic/angular framework.
the code provided by the braintree documentation is meant to sit on a server (the backend) which you must then access through an api that you develop on your client project (the frontend).
This is a much more secure way of connecting to braintree and how the braintree developers would prefer us to connect.