We wrote a bunch of utility methods around io-ts at work with custom error reporting/handling, otherwise it can indeed feel a bit too fp-/boilerplate-heavy for your every day frontend development, especially in combination with other stuff such as rxjs/redux.

But once you have those set up, it's an easy breeze, and the benefits are enormous. Our helper-method with the hopefully self-explanatory name "validateOrThrow<T>(t:TypeGuardForT)" is essentially called at every point where there is some form of incoming external data, and the amount of debugging-headaches that have simply disappeared because of this is mind-blowing.