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I come from a Java / Kotlin background and TS is totally fine.

Some quirks I've noticed are typed objects not performing any validations, like for building DTOs. Structural typing so the newtype pattern is not possible without some awkward hacks. A general "disconnect" between compile time and run time behaviour, so once you start casting your errors are relegated to property access/usage time, which makes — IMO excessive — test coverage paramount in catching bugs wherever you have conditional logic.

I would have gone with C# or Kotlin if I had the luxury of choice, but I'll get that with a deliberate career move maybe.

If you’re taking in data from an external source that needs to be validated, I highly recommend a schema library like zod, that can produce a typescript type.

That way you can define the type in a single place, have runtime validation for that type, but also be able to use the type in typescript at compile time.

Can you use something like Zod with the newtype pattern? I use DDD-style types for domain specific data over primitives.

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