I still see projects with "strict": false in their tsconfig.json.

This defeats the purpose of TypeScript. The "any" type is a virus that spreads throughout your codebase, silently disabling the type checker.

Yes, strict mode is annoying at first. It forces you to handle null and undefined explicitly. But that is exactly where 90% of runtime errors come from.

Pay the tax upfront, or pay it with interest during a production outage.