From my experience with TS, it usually goes from JS with types (what I usually write) to something that looks like a class-based language like Java or C# (for example Angular). Most of the decisions in TS make sense if you consider that the goal is to be able to statically type the existing JS ecosystem. It's boring compared to some of the alternatives like Resript or Elm in that it's just another layer on JS rather than a new way of doing things.
For Rust, it's another kind of boring. The language may be new, but lots of libraries are there. If you want to do something, you can usually pull a few libaries, read the (usually great) documentation, write some glue code and your problem is solved. In that way the experience is usually close to Go.
OCaml is another kind of boring. It's less "crazy" than something like Haskell or Scala. It's really stable, code from 20+ years ago can compile just fine. You can write most of your code as plain functions and data structures but you still have the object and module systems if you need them. Even when they bring big changes to the language such as removing the GIL and adding multicore, they work hard to make sure that existing code won't break and single core performance won't suffer too much.
My point with all of that is that boring means different things to different people. People identities are stongly tied to the language they use (I talk a bit more about that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28256211). People talking about "boring" languages is probably a reaction to people talking about "exciting" languages and trying their identities to them. Someone says he learned Haskell, I feel inferior because he knows Haskell and JS and I only know JS, but I can counter that by saying that I "focus on the product" and "solve real problems" with "boring languages".
I like the irony that on the same website, there is an article about "Keeping your identity small" (http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html) and how people that don't use Lisp can't even understand why Lisp is better (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html).