Sure, it is optional, but I've seen the unnecessary complexity seep into codebases over time, even though the software was originally elegant and simple.
I'm not sure if such perversions exist, it's been a while already since I touched TypeScript. To me the whole system seems perverted in the sense that an inexperienced developer can easily make things unnecessarily complex.
You are preaching to the choir. I have been using TypeScript for around 7 years, and it's great in a lot of ways, but unnecessary complexity is everywhere in the TS world. I regularly see elaborate type acrobatics that kneecap TSServer because of recursive types and complex inference. It would be fine if it was just hard to read/understand, but it can have profound negative DX consequences. I once encountered some complex types that were causing tsc to take over 5 minutes to run on a reasonably large codebase (~200K lines). Removing them dropped the type-checking time down to 2 minutes. I wish devs would stop worrying about making _everything_ type-safe and just write a few damn unit tests.
Or is there critical typing functionality that Typescript accommodates only perversely?