I think you are asking the wrong question. The right question is whether it is worth opting out of the benefits of typescript. The answer to that is probably no

I think you are asking the wrong question. The right question is whether it is worth opting out of the benefits of typescript. The answer to that is probably no for lots of people. Another valid question to ask is if typescript is all there is when it comes to those benefits. And the question to that is also no. It's a nice step up from Javascript. But why stop after that? There are so many other languages out there that offer so much more. And some of them even transpile to javascript. Regarding your points: I) this is indeed endemic in the javascript world. I would not blame typescript for this. I work with Java and Kotlin a lot. Things are more stable there. Five years is short for compatibility. In the js world, six months is long. II) The typescript annotations are documentation too. They help your IDE figure out what is what and enable things like autocomplete. The original js code probably isn't a whole lot better. Also, lots of libraries are developed in typescript these days. III) That's what happens in weakly typed and highly asynchronous environments. Pure javascript just moves that burden to runtime. Better to deal with it before you deploy your code. IV) Most modern javascript is transpiled. It's a compilation target at this point. So you might as well make full use of the fact that there is a compilation step. The packaging and minification is actually just as bad.