[SomeCallMeTim]

It's not a TypeScript mistake.

You could argue that it was a C++ mistake. It makes parsing harder, but otherwise seems to work as expected, so I don't consider it a mistake, but you could at least argue that way.

But regardless if it was a mistake in C++, it's now a complete standard, used in C++, Java, C#, and other languages to denote type parameters.

I would argue that it would have been a mistake to break that standard. What would you have used, and in what way would that have been enough better to compensate for the increased difficulty in understanding TypeScript generics for users of almost every other popular language?

[vips7L]

It's definitely the right choice for Typescript. You could have gone the Scala route and used [] for generics, but that is so heavily used in ts/js as arrays it would not have made any sense.