> Where I'm from, sanity has historically been the minority opinion
You are conflating santity for your subjective opinion. I guess your post might have been received better if you showed more awereness of that.
> That's completely subjective.
Yes. Which is why i prefixed "Personally I...". I'm clear about this being my opinion, not an universal truth.
> Personally, I don't know how to fix a piece of code without being able to see with my own eyes how/where/why it breaks
If the compiler tells me I'm passing a string to a function expecting a number, I find that error pretty easy to grasp, and I don't need to run the code to know how to proceed from that error-message.
> But TS is not a static language, where types actually matter; it's a restrictive "sanity checker" overlay on top of a dynamic language.
Sure. But if you (and that's up to you!) decide to write your code using types and allow TypeScript to check them, at least you know that your code in isolation is unaffected by whatever dynamic runtime it will end up being run on.
> And not one that's good enough for me to sacrifice the expressivity that JavaScript allows.
So you prefer to go full iron, and rather trust the correctness of your own code, than having a compiler check it for you.
That's your choice, ofcourse, but if that's how you do things, you cannot come afterwards and claim that TypeScript is a bad language based on that. It's a bad match for you, and how you would rather manually be in control of everything.
But just tells us about how you like things, it says nothing about the language itself.
> we get all these (generations of) people with the impression that JS is a "low sanity" language...
Javascript as a language has lots of quirks. Lots of quirks which are unexpected to most developers not coming from Javascript. That is to say, Javascript behaves differently than most other programming-languages.
I'm not saying it's wrong or "not sane", but programmers coming from other languages will make assumptions and those assumptions will be wrong for "plain" Javascript, leading to buggy code.
Typescript embraces the modern parts of Javascript, and makes them easy to work with, and makes your code easier to prove correct than plain Javascript would. That's why people like it. That's why people use it.
> and that it needs, of all possible features, even more of a type system.
This is not specific to JS. I think any language used to build bigger systems benefits from having a type-system to ensure the components interacting are always interacting in a known good way.
To me it seems like you're one of those people who prefers to work with all the quirks that Javascript provides and considers those to be good things, even though they are (much) harder to formally verify.
Where Typescript tries to force you to make formal declarations for your code, you find those limiting or getting in your way. Great. Be a superstar if you like.
Me (and many others) on the other hand, are just human, and we like a compiler to tell us about obvious errors in our code without having to discover them at runtime, or even worse, in production.