Yes. `any` really does turn off all type checking. You see that offhand mentioned in this article talking about some of the paradoxes of `any`. `unknown` is sti

Yes. `any` really does turn off all type checking. You see that offhand mentioned in this article talking about some of the paradoxes of `any`. `unknown` is still type checked and is arguably "merciless" type-checked that to do much of anything with an `unknown` you have to check for a more specific type first or the compiler returns an error that what you are doing isn't known to be valid for `unknown`. Some of that happens "automatically" at this point in the large number of ways that types can now be narrowed implicitly in Typescript (type guards [library functions], type asserts, the `typeof` runtime operator, the `in` runtime operator [as of recently], etc), so it can feel like `unknown`/`any` are the same up to a point, that point being where the runtime type is trivially known based on if statements and library functions around your use of the type. (Fun fact: `any` predates most type narrowing and `unknown` by several major Typescript versions. So `any` beyond just being the final "escape hatch" from type checking is also something of a legacy tool.)