My use case is a bit odd, but I've been using it for small personal web projects — so small that no dependencies are being pulled in and bare tsc is being used in place of a bundler — and as someone who doesn't have all of the ins/outs and do's/don'ts of JavaScript committed to memory (the vast majority of code I write is Swift or Kotlin) it's wonderful to have something catching errors before I save and reload the browser window as well as preventing "silent" bugs JS is notorious for.
Same here, I've found it very useful in projects where I don't have a lot of dependencies.
In another project with more exotic dependencies, it has become a hassle somewhat. I've found learning the .d.ts syntax to help easily get out of a situation, but it was a learning curve I still run into sometimes.
I do that sometimes too. Sometimes I type the couple things I need out of a module. If it's something I end up relying on more, I usually start digging deeper and end up cloning it. The hardest are the large libraries with no types and no DefinitelyTyped types. Also monorepos can be annoying, when the main package is typed but the individual packages aren't, if you have to start poking at things deeper.
You do get a lot of escape hatches for different outcomes though, dependant on amount of desired effort
Although this seems to be the opposite sentiment to what many are saying which is that it's more useful in larger projects, with many contributors, I think I probably understand this side more.
Dependencies are where it starts to get tricky. It also gets tough when someone else has configured TypeScript, or you need to add some complex config. I would still opt out for smaller projects because they don't quite benefit so much from TypeScript, and eventually I would expect to run into something that would eat at hours of my time for a simple change.
Offtopic perhaps, but if most of your code is in Swift or Kotlin, have you tried the new Kotlin frontend support? I don't have any project where I can use Kotlin in the backend right now but I've always wanted to give the Kotlin frontend a go as an alternative to TypeScript.
I haven't, mostly because none of my front end web projects feel large/complex enough to justify the extra overhead (probably wouldn't even be using TypeScript if it were any more involved than running `tsc --watch` in a terminal window). Might look into it for future projects though.
