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If you write your library in typescript, not JS, do you still have any of these problems?

If not, it sounds like one core issue is 'adding types to an existing untyped codebase is hard'. This checks out. :)

Writing new library and expecting people to actually use it without providing types is not realistic. You can write library in JS, but you will still need to provide types, since that's what ecosystem is right now.

I disagree it's hard per se, but I'd agree it's hard to do well. Especially if you have a bunch of JS functions that return (or expect) objects with very similar but slightly different properties. Figuring out the overlap and the semantic relationship between the types is often challenging, because the original authors never thought about the problem in terms of what types of objects they were dealing with.

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