TypeScript is a lie we tell ourselves to feel safe.
We write types like they mean something. We export interfaces and define generics and argue about unknown vs any. We spend hours making the compiler happy. Then we ship JavaScript that ignores every single type we wrote.
The promise was simple. TypeScript would catch bugs before runtime. Your code would be safer. Your refactors would be confident. Type errors would save you from shipping broken code.
That is not what happened.
TypeScript says your function takes a string. Cool. Runtime gets an object anyway. Your app crashes. The types did not save you.
I have seen it a thousand times. Perfect types at compile time. Runtime chaos in production. API returns null when TypeScript says it cannot. User input breaks assumptions your types guaranteed were safe. Third-party libraries lie about their types.
The disconnect is fundamental. TypeScript lives in one world. JavaScript runs in another. We pretend the bridge between them is solid. It is not.
Remember when JavaScript was simple? You wrote a function. It worked or it did not. Now you write the function, then you write the types, then you fight with the compiler about variance and conditional types.
Simple things become complex. A basic object needs an interface. A function needs generics. Suddenly you are reading TypeScript docs instead of building features.
We added layers of abstraction and called it safety. But the runtime does not care about your carefully crafted types. All that complexity evaporates the moment the code runs.
Type gymnastics make us feel smart. They do not make our code better.
We chose complexity over simplicity and called it progress.
TypeScript is a lie. But it is a lie we want to believe. We need to feel like we control the chaos. We need compile-time validation even when runtime betrays us. We need the illusion that types protect us from ourselves.
So we keep writing them. We keep pretending they matter. We keep teaching TypeScript as best practice while shipping code that proves types do not prevent bugs.
The lie persists because we have nothing better to believe in.