My project is in Typescript so I do transpile the main process files.
It didn't work when I added the try...catch in the main module before transpilation, but I was able to add a simple script like the following and that worked.

require('./application')
try {
    const options = {
        debug: true,
        ignore: [ 'src' ]
    }
    require('electron-reloader')(module, options)
} catch (err) {
    console.log(err)
}

I require the main module after transpilation and copy this wrapper script as a static asset for development mode only.
A little node in the README could point users to this workaround.