Totally agree, and I suggest turning the strict option on (in tsconfig). There are a plethora of additional bugs that the TypeScript compiler will catch for you, but they're turned off by default (though I think create-react-app turns it on now?). For example, making sure class members are initialized. For a greenfield project I see no reason not to turn it on; TS obviously leaves it off by default because it would make working with older code that much harder.