Ya I am also perplexed about how people keep suggesting using jsdoc instead of TypeScript. Is it just to avoid the tooling?
Not saying it’s the best reason, but a reason nonetheless.
The typescript tooling was extremely simple to setup with only a few added packages... until I had to setup eslint. That's when I had to install a half dozen plugins, adapters, parsers, etc like you said.
Granted, the linked eslint rewrite seems to have plans to make the typescript linting tooling simpler. However, I might end up switching to Rome in the meantime just for simpler dependency management.
Of course they don’t have nearly the same amount of rules, but we’ll get there.
JS is the front-end browser language. That's its origin story and it almost certainly will always have that job, because of web browser backwards compatibility.
That's why it's so universally known / used / understood.
Once you target TypeScript you're suddenly looking at a much smaller set of devs who know it, and you're married to a language that's effectively owned by a single company (MS, to boot).
You can get decent gains in type-checking by writing JSDoc and using tsc in your build process without adding much friction for new contributors.