This is a silly take. There were certainly plenty of large projects written in JS before Typescript existed or became popular, some maintained by small teams or single individuals. There are plenty of large projects written in Python pre-typing, in PHP, etc.
I personally choose to work with typed languages most of the time, and I’m thoroughly convinced of their value, but acting like it is literally impossible to write a large project without types is just inaccurate.
So I should probably preface and say that it is not possible within the budget I have (We are ~2 full time developing and maintaining everything on a 140k LOC platform spanning from infrastructure, backend, multiple frontends).
Yeah, it just means those teams had to do a lot of work themselves which type systems do automatically. Given that the entire point of computing is automating things which a human could have done by hand, it makes more sense to talk about cost rather than capability.
We are not really over worked. Nobody puts in more than 30 hours, and we deliver the features the business need.
However, we do have types and don't do type coercion. Types are sound full stack db -> backend -> frontends. We don't do any funky things. We don't use SSR (as the business does not require it). We test well, but not too much. We keep a sane architecture.
We can also skip out on a lot of project shenanigans and mostly focus on our work.
We don't (yet) use AI as a part of our workflows, and frankly, I don't see we can keep this way of working with the current gen AI.
> There are plenty of large projects written in Python.
There are, but they are certainly a pain in the ass to work with.
I once had to work on a semi-large Python codebase and got so frustrated that I wanted to port the code to some other language. The best part? I wrote the majority of that codebase myself, just months earlier.
Just keep in mind there are a thousand people right behind you who would be ecstatic to be able to work on this "nightmare" in order to earn a paycheck.
I personally choose to work with typed languages most of the time, and I’m thoroughly convinced of their value, but acting like it is literally impossible to write a large project without types is just inaccurate.