Maybe this isn't what the GP comment meant, but I think codegen can serve this function pretty well nowadays. I'm currently working on two separate projects, the first is a Django project with DRF and I codegen with drf-spectacular [1] and openapi-typescript-codegen [2]. The other project also uses Django, with the API through Hasura and codegen with graphql-codegen [3]. In both of these cases I've been able to largely avoid duplicating my models clientside, or at least it isn't manual.
1: https://github.com/ferdikoomen/openapi-typescript-codegen