[agos]

the codebases I've worked at in the last ten years are not as half arsed as that - and of course from my point of view are "real" enough.

If a codebase is so unkempt the issue is not Typescript - and forgive for writing such a platitude, but you can write awful code in Java, too.

[tpm]

Yes but it will be typed awful code and the typing provides a grounding of sorts. However awful code in untyped/dynamically typed langs can be unspeakably bad. I have many years of Perl experience...