For those of us who don't use Node on a daily basis and can't immediately map the consequences of the unbundling of the gCloud packages, please provide more detailed guidance to help us through this change.

I assume this problem recurs across the documentation for each of supported GCP services:

Currently

https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/google-cloud-node/#/docs/google-cloud/0.56.0/storage/file

google-cloud is deprecated
Due to the scope of our API rapidly increasing, you may notice a decrease in performance if you continue to use the bundled module, google-cloud.

Going forward, please install only the individual service modules that you need, such as @google-cloud/storage.

but the documentation reflects what's now not-recommended:

var gcloud = require('google-cloud');
var gcs = gcloud.storage();

Recommend

If you are using or would prefer to use the bundled module:

var gcloud = require('google-cloud');
var storage = gcloud.storage();

Recommend: If you are using or would prefer to use the individual service module for storage:

var Storage = require('@google-cloud/storage');
var storage = Storage();