Recently, Typescript was complaining about an implicit `any` even though the VSCode tooltip clearly could infer the actual type (it confusingly was showing both cases in the tooltip). I finally realized that VSCode's built-in inference worked here but Typescript didn't work at all because I forgot I was importing a .js file rather than a .ts file.
VSCode for course also downloads @types/* files in the background even in vanilla JS projects which is super helpful because you get effortless intellisense. That it does this kind of stuff out of the box is the sort of reason why I've lost my Vim/Emacs fanaticism over the years.