That was my experience with TS maybe two years ago - at this point project scaffolding tools are good enough to generate sane output that I spend a little bit of time upfront but then keep plowing away. Maybe I got better at it as well - but I haven't kept up with TS news in a long time and I don't feel like I'm missing out on stuff or encountering things I don't understand.

I've written >50k LoC of TS in last few months for sure (doing a huge frontend migration for a client) and I can't remember the last time I googled anything TS related. Actually I remember - a month ago I wanted to know how to define a type with a field excluded, took 30 seconds of google.

Meanwhile the project started out as mixed TS and ES6 because most of the team was unfamiliar with it and there are a few dynamic typing evangelists - we ended up going back and just using TS all over the place, the complexity introduced is minimal and the productivity boost from good tooling on product of this scale is insane.