I made this discovery just yesterday. I tried converting a tiny side project from vanilla JS to Typescript because I wanted to see what all the hype was about. I had this idea in my head(perhaps naively) that I would catch an edge case/silent error or two in my application that I did not know existed prior to implementing static typing.

Instead, I spent a whole bunch of time wrestling with the tooling and configs in order to get my (previously working) code to compile.

I'm not trying to make the conclusion that typescript is bad, as I've hardly even used it at this point. But from my experience, it's not exactly the 1:1 from JS that some people argue. My takeaway is that there can be real value to be had from static typing in JS, but it might not always make sense to introduce the tooling overhead for tiny codebases that are developed by a single maintainer.