"even then it was clear that types were a good idea and the implementations were not"

I still feel this way about the state of the art. I want solid type support in my language ... but I do not feel TypeScript is the best possible implementation at all, and for many situations I feel implicitly typed (but still using all of VS Code's type features) Javascript is actually better than using TypeScript.

I eagerly await the day when someone actually gets a JS typing tool right and I prefer using it over raw Javascript.