For simple method and field references sure, but once you push it with method chains and transformations it becomes pretty underwhelming quickly. Typescript also isn't invincible to this, but it's better. If you are going into a small well scoped code base vanilla js should be fine. For a large code base with plenty of package sharing, good luck in either. To me the investment in TS sounds like someone crossed their arms and said "I'm not doing java". Their loss, as a java dev I rarely think about languages. Stuff gets done fast, with few or no errors and no need for special tooling or forced approaches. Kotlin is an area of interest for me these days but that's about it.
