What's really missing is a seamless ability to add runtime checks to TypeScript. Otherwise, between Flowtype and TypeScript, static type checking is a solved problem in JS.

Hegel is basically a less mature version of Flow. I preferred Flow over TS for the longest time, but let's face it – TS won in terms of absolute adoption, with very little prospect for anyone to take over.

https://deepkit.io/ may be of interest to you! It deeply patches the TS type compiler to make all types visible at runtime, enabling a lot of annotation-style workflows and dependency injection possible completely within the type annotation system: https://docs.deepkit.io/english/runtime-types.html

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31663298 - it's downright mindblowing that all this seems to be the work of primarily a single developer.

For a less intrusive solution, https://github.com/jquense/yup is a great library to reach for whenever you're defining the shape of a network-transmitted object and don't want to introduce compilation stages.