I found especially that working with a project that requires a lot of extra bits to be installed (like the react ecosystem) makes working with JavaScript libraries from typescript especially painful, since you need to get typescript definitions for all of them, and they may not always mesh well together.
I believe the latest version of Visual Studio Code can automatically install the type dependencies from the IDE (e.g. a quick fix if the type definitions are missing).
In recent Typescript it defaults not found modules to type `any` and only complains if `--noImplicitAny` is used.
Even with `--noImplicitAny`, it's gotten pretty easy. Leave a scratch .d.ts file somewhere in your project and when you install a new library you can start with:
That gives you an explicit `any` for those libraries. Then you can go back and add types later.
The number of npm packages with types directly included is growing at an impressive rate (even Facebook often bundles them for React libraries), so there's not even the need to seek out types in so many cases these days.
