This 100%!
You can get TS to a place where it’s decent to work with. You just need to install ts-pattern, fp-ts, ts-essentials, eslint, and prettier. Then make sure you have all of the settings maxed on in tsconfig.json. Also add rules to prevent people from using @ts-ignore, @ts-expect-error, implicit and explicit any, don’t allow using undefined, add rules for fp-ts to force using it instead of unsafe built ins, and don’t allow anyone to do weird type casting like let t: string = 42 as any as unknown and you will be able to work very, very, very slowly as you write lots of boilerplate and type annotations.
Oh, and all of those ESLint rules and plugins slow down VSCode 