I'd say for most people, beyond small scripts/cli/micro-microservices, the ceremony of setup/environment overhead for it is worth it, and continually pays dividends. You can usually copy-paste a common config file around to bootstrap.
Most of your (pretty good actually) critique are points to make the least-bad way of doing JavaScript even better, and I'd agree could be improved.
Others have taken notice.
"Native support" of TypeScript is done by Deno.
And tight TypeScript (and other adjacent tooling) integrations with VS Code and WebStorm.
And transpilation is being worked on by various builders. Stripping types and running through esbuild or swc is fast.
For typechecking part, was a proposal to have TypeScript be rewritten in Rust for performance.
We can lament that JavaScript went from being a web document enhancer to being shoehorned into a full application compilation toolchain, but the old Jquery thru Expressjs era of doing things has significant drawbacks for full sized applications/APIs/etc.
I haven't found much agreement, or at least to the extent I believe it, that Javascript and HTML and CSS have all been shoehorned and built upon completely beyond their original specs.
Those sound like the least controversial opinions ever.
What's nice is that despite looking ugly, those shoe horns have done a pretty good job, and they all make effective tools for building useful stuff, and that stuff can be built by people who aren't very good at building stuff.
It's very much a success story that so much html/css/JavaScript is a garbage fire. They're really effective tools, up there with excel
Most of your (pretty good actually) critique are points to make the least-bad way of doing JavaScript even better, and I'd agree could be improved.
Others have taken notice.
"Native support" of TypeScript is done by Deno. And tight TypeScript (and other adjacent tooling) integrations with VS Code and WebStorm.
And transpilation is being worked on by various builders. Stripping types and running through esbuild or swc is fast. For typechecking part, was a proposal to have TypeScript be rewritten in Rust for performance.
We can lament that JavaScript went from being a web document enhancer to being shoehorned into a full application compilation toolchain, but the old Jquery thru Expressjs era of doing things has significant drawbacks for full sized applications/APIs/etc.