Steal has an uncompressed file: steal.js and a compressed file: steal.production.js. One of these files has to be included in your HTML for steal to work.
When you change the name of the production file using the production property, it's your app's production files you are changing, not steal's.
The thread you linked to wanted to cache bust steal's production file, which is something that can't be done right now because the file name steal.production.js is hard coded.