I agree, one of the nicest changes in programming for me is a plugin for intellij and PHP that does static analysis and flags "foo may be be null" via an inspection (it actually does a hell of a lot more than that, truly stellar plug "Enhanced EA Inspections" if anyone has a PHP codebase and uses intellij btw).

It catches so many stupid cases where I'd have call bar on foo where foo could be undefined.

TypeScript handles it pretty well given the constraints it has to work in.