There are many aspects to it. From setting up a new project to 'edit a line and reload in the browser'. Everything feels so much faster, lighter, fresher.

I'm one of many who don't seem to understand your point of view. how would editing and reloading be faster than hot reloading? I usually edit my styling live in Sublime while viewing the changes in Chrome.

Styling?

I usually write down styles to some kind of Notepad and then rewrite it to sass. At the beginning it was annoying, because I was forgetting that my css will be reloaded, but I got used to it.

yep, as in style sheets. personally I prefer Sass before native CSS, so I usually use the broader term to avoid assumptions about the technology stack used.

tsc --watch is incredibly fast.

And you don't need a bundler and hot-reloading. Just stick to JS modules, output JS modules and let the browser take care of it.

But when you use a tool like webpack it's even simpler - you just save your file and it recompiles & reloads.

You can also run 'tsc -w' (watch mode) and it will automatically recompile as soon as files change. And since doing so maintains a local cache of the compiler's state in memory it's extremely fast.

The tiny amount of time I spend waiting for compiles is several orders of magnitude less than when I had to deal with the lack of static typing, particularly when refactoring code.

Fast REPL cycle.