VSCode was started to see if they could build a good web application for development. Portions of it directly power a number of tools of Azure (on portal.azure.com), portions of it also directly powered the Dev Tools inside IE10+ and Edge "Classic". Bundling the web app into an Electron container after it had already paid for its own engineering efforts several times over as reusable sets of components for multiple large web apps Microsoft needed hardly seems like a "trojan horse" to me.
AFAIK it was, the issue was the poor quality of Javascript development they were having and their inability to really get good tooling and static analysis. Then it kind of exploded as other people said "That's cool" and they then pushed it out as open source so that if they did need to let it go it wouldn't be totally dead in the water.
Go was created to solve Google's problems with C++ and engineering at scale
The fact that TypeScript wasn't created to solve a big issue internally at Microsoft is exactly what makes me skeptical of it and personally I view it as a trojan horse, just like VSCode. Sure, today it is done for benevolent reasons, maybe, but what about tomorrow? What if that trillion dollar market cap starts tanking? Then The benevolent VSCode and TypeScript ecosystems become levers to pull in the great big machine.
I would almost feel better if I knew it's stated explicit purpose upfront and what Microsoft's long term goals to monetize the ecosystem/platform were, because then I know what I am signing up for.