I also didn't like using observables with Angular to fetch/send data to API's. Not everything is an event stream, why can't we use the right tool for the job?
Strict type checking is often reported as confusing for folks getting started with Angular and web development. That's why by default our type checking is not the strictest we support.
To make sure advanced developers have better compile-time type checking and editor support, we introduced strict mode. When you create a new workspace the CLI asks you if you want to get it enabled.
In the future, incrementally, we'll be enabling strict settings for everyone.
It still seems strange to me, if you start a new Angular project then you know you're writing TypeScript, no ifs or buts - and that means if you write some code that doesn't compile, you'll have to fix it before it runs. I don't understand why that's seen as different in the template layer?
Great that it's there at all though, last time I developed with Angular templates didn't have type checking at all, and it kind of hurt.
To get the same strictness as in TypeScript, you can enable `strictTemplates` in tsconfig.json. Here's our guide which goes into more details https://angular.io/guide/template-typecheck.
I think the idea is to provide a single async abstraction so everything can be used with rxjs operators. I've taken advantage of this several times with something like "combineLatest" to return the result of a http call and an event stream.
You can also call "toPromise" in rxjs to turn an observable into a then-able promise.