These can make sense if you think of TS as better-checked JavaScript, not as a from-scratch design for a statically typed language. Excess property checks catch a common JavaScript bug (typoed property names), structural static typing matches the dynamic duck typing JavaScript authors had already been working with (though I see how nominal would be useful), and it's awesome they found a workable hack for discriminated unions where the code and objects look like what you'd do in vanilla JS, but checked (and requiring the class to have a specific structure seems fine as limitations go).

I get how folks coming from "natively" static type systems could find all this weird, but I think by targeting "JS but with better checks" instead of a more fundamental redesign, the TypeScript crew have managed to build something that can get traction where other efforts have not.

As someone that uses the language everyday, these are real quirks on the language, but they are not showstoppers. The benefits of using exactly the same language in front-end and back-end, with shared types and everything, largely offset the small quirks.

However sometimes I kinda miss some functional stuff that you can for example find in Scala or Rust, like pattern matching. Specifically, we've had experience using/developing an input validation library for the backend in Typescript (https://github.com/StrontiumJS/Framework/) that is composable and also returns the correct type in one go. We used a lot of try catches for that, but that makes validation slow. So we started using "maybe promises" which are similar to Scala's Futures with Success/Failure. But the fact you don't have pattern matching in Typescript like in Scala makes it a bit ugly.