[pingec]

>Not having to constantly keep adding types all over

You don't have to if you don't want to.

>not having to constantly refactor things because I now accept object instead of an int etc is refreshing

Again this is your choice, you can omit types if you want

TS gives you the option to add typing if you want it. And that is huge in my book, try refactoring a large enterprise app written in JS vs. written in TS.

[nmjohn]

Okay so if you don't use types, wouldn't you would just be writing vanilla javascript and would have no reason to use typescript in the first place though?

[lmm]

It has a somewhat nicer syntax for functions and better scoping rules, but you could certainly get that from a more lightweight js extension like coffeescript yeah.

[klibertp]

Not exactly, there is still type inference mechanism at work which, combined with DefinitelyTyped (https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped) declarations will get you quite a lot type safety even if you won't write any type declaration by yourself.