With the disclaimer that I don't get paid for my Typescript work (I use it for some personal projects, as it saves me a bit of time compared to C++), I have this as the compile scripts entry in my package.json:

    "compile": "tsc -p ./tsconfig.json",

I also have a start script, for running it from the command line:

    "start": "npm run compile && node ./.build/main.js"

tsc has some kind of file-watching mode, that I assume compiles when you save stuff, but I don't use that, because I'm not a monster.

Yeah, we use tsc for node. I typically just use ts-node for development, though, and tsc gets to hang out in CI/CD somewhere. I assume ts-node / webpack / etc all use tsc under the hood, though.

I use cc instead of make, and javac instead of Gradle fairly often for various purposes like debugging or experimenting. Is the js world different?

Yes. ts-node is great for development, but for deployment (in our ci/cd) we run tsc to compile the typescript down to javascript.

For node projects I use ts-node with nodemon watching for filechanges and takes care of restarting the server. And then to build the project for release thats done with tsc.

I use tsc -w, what do you use? I'm not using it on the frontend but for nodejs (i would use webpack on the frontend)

Depends on your IDE. In practice, tsc is a build step in CI/CD, not a dev tool (if you’re using a good IDE).

in a project I worked on, we used tsc with msbuild to build our frontend.