Sometimes I wish something akin to Dart (but probably not Dart) had taken off instead of the TypeScript approach. I.e. a JS based language that broke a few things to get types but largely ran on the same VM and could still easily be transpiled in the meantime. Avoid the whole "separate syntax on top of the way the underlying syntax behaves" set of logic.

I suppose WASM enables layered languages like AssemblyScript comes close in many ways but it's also a bit too separated from the primary webpage use case.