Echo JS 0.11.0

I'm agree. I don't like taking the time to enforce the typing over JS. But currently it seems to be the trend of the moment...

What it comes down to for me... I prefer JS over say C# for even server-side development.  Mainly because the lack of typing enforcement and flexibility.  If I'm using TypeScript, I may as well be using C# even if it's costing me in terms of time and velocity.

Interesting that you compare TS with C# and that you prefer C# since they have completely different ecosystems. .NET libraries tend to be money centered, which means you have to pay to use them.

I prefer JS over C#, I prefer C# over TS ... C# (.Net Core) is open-source... I don't have to pay anyone to use it.

TypeScript is super cool. It’s totally worth it for intellisense alone. I also find it very good in documenting my React components. The benefits have outweighed the downsides by far for us. I went from “meh” in the beginning of my TS project to “I dont want to work on js code anymore” a few days after. Give it a try ;)

I'm still in the "meh" phase, even after months of working on some projects that use typescript as well.
I do see the benefits, no question, but I'm still not 100% convinced. It might be more pleasant to write, but it's terribly noisy to read.
It does encourage writing more performant code tho. The stricter you type, the better your resulting JS can be optimized by e.g. V8.
You can write performant JS manually too, but it takes a lot of experience and discipline.

Just recently I migrated a library of mine to TS where the very complicated typing basically rubbed in my face that my JS was simply bad. It was about a flags object in the concrete case, and usually it had string keys and boolean values, but in some cases it could have string values for certain keys. After struggling a lot to properly type all modules and functions that consuming that object, I gave up, accepted that my approach was shite, and rewrote the architecture to use monomorphic objects instead, introducing a new and separate logic that deals with the string case. Now stuff is much cleaner, overall and if it were to scale, it would surely even perform better.

Still, I'm not 100% convinced yet. You read a lot that you don't have to type everything, and you can just add TS on top of js because it's a superset blah blah. In my experience, that's not realistic, and going Typescript does take away the expressivity of Javascript (one of its best features). 
Let's see. Hated Javascript for years, now I love it :)

> You can write performant JS manually too, but it takes a lot of experience and discipline.

There are a lot of times I specifically write less performing code for clarity... Unless it's a real world performance issue in a given use case.  To me, TS is a lot like testing, it guides you into thinking things through.  Writing testable code, and having a disciplined directory/feature/module structure helps a lot too.