[tasogare]

> 2006 era JS was more than sufficient to build out highly maintainable 100k+ LOC codebases

Typescript wouldn't have been created if this was the case.

[puppet-master]

Typescript was about bringing the culture of static languages to a language design that explicitly rejected it. Large JS codebases already existed in 2006 (Gmail, ..)

[lifthrasiir]

As far as I know Gmail used the Closure compiler which can be considered as a spiritual precursor to TypeScript. Also several Google service frontends were in fact based on GWT and written in Java.

[junon]

Microsoft creates useless things all the time and pushes them until they're finally accepted.