This is true, but a lot of projects are now starting with TS, and maybe could benefit from intentional limitations on inference, at least locally. I’m pretty sure most folks start new projects with strict enabled as is.
In my experience a lot of people don’t necessarily start projects with strict mode — and they _really really_ should ... most people I’ve talked to who couldn’t figure out how to use typescript never figured things out because they ended up somehow with a compiler configured with noImplicitAny: false — typescript really needs to find a way to change the default here ...
Yes, my advice is almost always strict should be true for every new project, and even sometimes for migration projects where the end goal is to absolutely decrease tech debt and bugs as quickly as possible and the team isn't afraid of a giant compiler error waterfall as motivation. (It's a nice auto-generated TODO list with some semblance of progress reporting!) But at the very least, everyone should do themselves the favor and "noImplicitAny: true" no matter if it's new, migration, something inbetween, and no matter what they think of any of the other strict flags. Explicit anys are searchable TODO markers and fine, but implicit anys always seem to be hidden bugs waiting to be found.