Two of my last three jobs did NOT need to compile down to ES5. The current shop is supporting only ES2020 browsers.
If you are using Babel as a compiler, you can enable the TS syntax plugin to have Babel strip TS type syntax out of its processing output, although this does not do any typechecking during the compilation process.
Any chance of JS being mostly Babel free by next year ?
Every major web framework's standard build tools (Create-React-App, Vue-CLI, etc), are based on Webpack + Babel, and most folks who are using one of those frameworks but setting up their own build toolchains still base them around Webpack + Babel.
There's some potentially interesting technical alternatives out there, but Babel is a keystone in the modern JS ecosystem.
It would also detect some probable bugs in your js code.
Of course after a day or two you would start writing typescript and never look back.