Node.js clients do not work (gRPC) but you can use the machine generated GAPI clients… thats how I access BigQuery from the notebook Google API Client / Tom Larkworthy / Observable
its only a few steps better than REST though and pretty painful all the way.
However, for public info in a public bucket. You can just fetch(URL) them right? No need for clients, the buckets speak REST. I think you just need to enable a CORS policy for the bucket and the data is public over vanilla HTTP.