"The whole ESD industry is heavily researched "....by the people trying to sell you ESD products, some of which veer very close to 'snake oil' territory.
As regards Farnell, I call "nothing to see here" - as long as the packaging doesn't generate static, that's perfectly adequate for shipping packaging. There is no significant risk of them experiencing enough of a static hit in transit for shielding to be necessary.
If the devices are packed and unpacked in a static-free environment, and the packaging won't generate anything from movement during shipping, what static exposure do they need protecting from that isn't present as soon as you open the packaging?
People often seem to forget about the D in ESD - 10KV on a pin won't damage anything - it needs a sufficiently low-impedance path to create a high enough current to cause damage. This means to be at risk from a charged person, there needs to be a reasonable capacitive or resistive coupling from the device to ground for any discharge current to flow.
This is why static-safe products like bench mats are resistive and not highly conductive. In the past people used to use polystyrene with foil - this is actually worse than just polystyrene, as the foil provides a nice low-impedance path with a reasonable capaacitance to ground for the very fast (sub nS) risetimes of a spark discharge.
Due to the small pin size, capacitance from an individual device pin isn't likely to be enough - touching an assembled board carries a much higher risk due to the board area coupling to ground, although to counter that, the board offers some protection as many pins will have components or other pins connected to them to help dissipate any current flow.