This is exactly my feeling about Typescript. As a Go! developer, I'm fully for strong types, even to the point of restriction, but only if they are enforced.

I'm currently maintaining a massive spaghetti code TypeScript nightmare that escape-hatches with @ts-ignore and `any` about every other line. I'm not sure why they even chose to give up all of the imperative, dynamic power of JS and then not even adhere to the pre-processor's own rules.

I think there's an argument for imperative and functional approaches, but I also think trying to change an imperative language into a functional one is a bad idea, and trying to shoe-horn in type safety into a language that doesn't have it is just foolish.

I feel like languages come with trade-offs inherent in their design (Go! trades DRY for type safety, JS trades data validation/type safety for convenience), and if you don't like the trade-offs of the language for your project, then you are probably using the wrong tool for the job. However, when it comes to JS, you usually don't have a choice (unless you go with Dart or WebASM, which I admittedly know very little about).

I suppose TS could have a place (I particularly understand libraries that attempt to improve their data contract using it), but then I wish it didn't provide such wide variety of ways to escape or ignore it's restrictions. I feel like they are fake guard rails and provide a false sense of security.