-
a thing people don't like to talk about is that Javascript is a pretty good language & you can write some pretty nice feeling front-end stuff without using any libraries at all
-
(this is a slight misrepresentation of how I work, if I am writing more than, ooh, 300 lines of code I will get Typescript set up. and maybe some packages if I need something specific. but you don't gotta!)
-
final secret: if you write some [ok, ok, slightly cumbersome] JSDoc statements at the top of a few key functions & objects, and you're using a smart enough IDE, you get 90% of the utility of Typescript