That’s pretty much the intent of the constraint. I don’t have time to sit with a type checker right now, but I don’t think we disagree as much as you might think. I arrived at this from years of trying to find the best way to express types which are as strict as possible with as much clarity as possible.

Unfortunately the object type is basically any non-null value, as is {}. They both intuitively mean what I want. They also inherently allow PropertyKey keys, which is effectively Record<string | number | symbol, any>, which is looser than the “dictionary” type I often want to accept in these scenarios.

A better question (for me, and maybe you and maybe all of us who want type certainties) is why we even accept dictionaries in object shapes when Map is the obvious expression of that type. I’ve repeatedly wanted that and shied away from it because it requires too much change for very little gain.