[vorpalhex]

Typescript isn't going to magically fix any issues, it'll just make your types a bit more obvious. Likewise, CoffeeScript, React, or any other tech isn't going to fix your issue.

Javascript is powerful and flexible, and sometimes that's a flaw.

It sounds like you need an architect who can look into modularization and setting some standards to in which teams are accountable. This isn't a perfect process, it usually takes a few iterations to see progress, and it requires a pitch to your business side of the house (usually along the lines of "Hey, we need more time to do maintenance work, but it'll drastically lower bugs seen by end users").

[donatj]

We have other codebases I developed in TypeScript that continue to be far far better places to be. The type safety really adds a lot to prevent you from doing dumb hard to understand things that just “work”. I know it’s not a magic bullet but it’s at least a shinier one.

[vorpalhex]

Right, and if you disabled 50% of the language, you would also have a better codebase, but the trade off is going to be that any development is probably slower.

Programming is about trade offs, and typescript offers you a fixed set of tradeoffs - much more project complexity for type checking ahead of time. That can be valuable in some instances - when one codebase has to be shared across a lot of team members that are unable to communicate well. But typically the better fix is to break down and modularize code so that we smaller, more easily managed pieces that can be handled by just a few hands.