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If that is indeed the case, I could see myself using TypeScript for everything. I generally dislike front-end tooling and how complex everything is, with everything having a build process (and CLI for some reason). For this reason alone, I avoid TypeScript when I can.

Has it been a while since you've done frontend development? For many use cases it "just works" now - webpack, the TS compiler, ESLint, React etc. is all well integrated

Definitely has been at least a year and a half. The last "proper front-end" thing I tried was ReactNative, and found that quite horrifying. After that, all I have written is ES5 JS that supports every browser I can think of.

Even just the ability to parse and run TS (without type necking it) would be spectacular. I hope you're right.

And we've come full circle back to VBScript in the browser.

Not to worry! Google won't let that happen. They'll push for Dart instead.