They are not using it correctly. Using any should just be a stopgap measure mostly for when you are converting a codebase to Typescript. This is just an example of someone using something because they think they should be using it.

There is no point in Typescript, as new ECMAScript specs provide most of the syntactic sugar and compile-time type checking is obviated by exactly 1 test, which people using it are writing anyway; this is not a compelling use-case for an entirely new syntax, and it needs to die, instead of contributing to the already-bloated ecosystem.