[squiggleblaz]

<i> > The Million Dollar Mistake is having unchecked nulls; TypeScript supports checked nulls so it's not an issue. TypeScript's nulls are much more similar to Maybe/Option than unchecked nulls</i>

<i>Good point in theory but my practical experience hasn't borne this out. That is because TypeScript is an "optionally typed" language and it hasn't been true in practice because of excessive use of explicit or implicit "any"s. </i>

I think that's a matter of your team's discipline. It's good practice, I think, to enable TypeScript's strict checks, including no-implicit-any, and, to the best of your ability, to keep people who don't understand types ignorant of explicit any and to fail any code that uses it. `any` is basically never necessary even in typing existing code - if you genuinely don't know what the type is at a certain point, you should probably write a type like `unknown`.

If you take any of Typescript's options to "ease the transition" you're taking Typescript's options to continue the difficulties. One moves to typescript because javascript's runtime errors are a problem; so it is natural that you will have novel compile time errors.