> This restriction is philosophical rather than technical. I get it though. TypeScript is a Microsoft product. Opening that floodgate would pollute the entire ecosystem. Nobody wants more Microsoft.
The reason Node disallows this has nothing to do with TypeScript being owned by Microsoft, it's because there's no guarantee the TSConfig settings used in the library you're pulling in match the ones in your project. A mismatch would mean you would get type errors inside the library code (assuming you're doing some form of type-checking in your application, otherwise what's the point of even using TypeScript).
> No TypeScript packages mean I need to find the latest churnware slop to bundle my stuff.
The TypeScript compiler itself comes with everything you need for this. See: https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#declaration
There are other advantages to bundling, but it's not strictly necessary if all you care about is publishing TS on NPM. Declaration files solve the problem by supplying the resolved types of the publicly exposed identifiers. Also has the added advantage of not locking out plain JS consumers.