In my defense, the backend contracts change so often in early development the any just made sense at first…
Refactorings and changes are the prime reason to use TypeScript. You edit your data objects and get squigglies everywhere shit won’t work anymore. A godsend!
One job I worked at wouldn't let us do this because it created too large of a QA impact (lol). We were only allowed to modify code in the smallest section possible so that testing could be isolated and go faster.
At another job they mandated that TypeScript wasn't allowed because it "slowed down development". It was soooo laughable. The number of bugs introduced that could have been readily caught was absurd, but management never put the two pieces together.
Typo'd property names when accessing was the biggest one. Assuming a property was one data type instead of another and not casting or handling it appropriately. Accidentally calling something like it's a method when it isn't.
I ran a bunch of plugins on my end to help with some of that, but many of the older or stubborn devs refused and would refuse anything but, like, vim with no add-ons.
I believe you don’t have to actually use (meaning “compile from”) typescript to profit from it. If you maul the compiler options hard enough, you might get it to analyze JavaScript and provide type checking.