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You don't have to commit to a big up-front effort. You can take an incremental approach and add type annotations as you need them.

Also, I'm not sure how adding type annotations results in over-engineered solutions. Types are just little sanity checks you spread around your code to help the compiler and linters to catch inconsistencies. You shouldn't have to re-engineer everything.

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My understanding is that now I have to also manage type definitions. It ends up being more code in my files and more files.

I'm a big fan of keeping files as minimal and simple as possible. I virtually "count" the number of language concepts that exist, and try to keep it as low as possible. Makes it easy for other developers to on-board and for me to re-on-board.

You don't have to do anything. Just drop TypeScript in as a replacement for babel. Whenever you find yourself wondering if a type annotation or definition would help, then do it. Leave it optional; no commitment required.

you don't actually have to manage type definitions for your own code (unless you're referring to typing parameter/return values), just things that you eg. fetch from the backend. those can be trivially generated by a tool from sample json or you can generate it all from things like OpenAPI.

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