> my perception of TS is that is a tool that removes friction between the language (JS) and tooling without really addressing anything core to the language itself.
I don't understand what that means. How is TypeScript removing friction between JavaScript and tooling? That doesn't make any sense. TypeScript is a typechecker and a language that compiles to JavaScript.
I’d say that TypeScript removes friction in the sense that you can use autocomplete fairly easily with it, out of the box. Using autocomplete without type annotations is pretty hard.
OK but then that's ... not actually a criticism? And when the person I replied to says, 'doesn't address issues of the language itself', that's not actually even accurate. TypeScript addresses several large sources of errors in every codebase, like null or undefined errors.
