It's worth noting that TypeScript is a Microsoft product. As TypeScript has become increasingly popular, I'd imagine that Microsoft has also paid increasing amounts of attention to the JavaScript ecosystem.
TypeScript was created to solve issues with front end development at MS, its just that they were also genuinely interested about solving other people's problems.
Typescript is supported by Google in Angular2, so it's not a completely Microsoft dominated effort. It's also just a transpiler so it doesn't call into a bunch of closed source Windows APIs which might not work quite right when implemented on non-MS platforms.
I like how nobody has realized that typescript is classic Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish. Oh no, they have "turned a corner". This is a different Microsoft! Haha.. they are exactly the same. Every single company has wanted to try and control JavaScript as it takes over more and more of the roles other languages used to fill.
Google failed with their new language, Microsoft is having some success. Google claimed "javascript was too slow, so we need Dart". Hmm, turns out to be complete bullshit and electron applications are now the standard way to create desktop applications. Microsoft is claiming "you need static typing", which is more bullshit.
First Microsoft embraced JavaScript, then they made TypeScript to extend it, and now there is talk of "hey why not just use c# with web assembly etc". "why not just make deno TypeScript only". "what if Chrome only ran TypeScript, would it be faster?".
With vscode->typescript->github, Microsoft is managing to gain control of the masses of mediocre developers, while the good programmers will always be elusive. A digital divide is getting bigger.
The tale of Typescript was that several of Microsoft's own JS codebases had gotten too huge to manage in just JS and Typescript was built to scratch their own itch first. Microsoft happened to have a smart developer-focused division that also realized that Microsoft's own customers could benefit from the tool, too.
Microsoft has invested quite heavily into some very large TS codebases: VS Code/Monaco, VSTS, the Azure portal, large components of Office, large components of Bing, and so forth. Given the scale of some of those projects (in terms of users at the very least, even before you get into metrics like lines of code or dollars generated), that is a lot of benefit to having a strong tool like Typescript to do that work in. Many of the same developers working in Typescript use C++ and/or C# daily, so they already understood the usefulness of things like static type checking. Releasing it to the public when they did seemed a very cogent realization that that "enterprise JS application problem" was far bigger than just Microsoft and they were in a good place to help with that, given it's long been a goal of the company to help developers.
As for a Typescript proposal for TC39, I'm willing to bet everyone is still worried about accidentally creating a second "ES4" debacle, including Microsoft. I'd love to see, and would much more expect at this point, a pragmatic compromise like Python's PEP 526 [0] / PEP 3107 [1] project, encouraging JS engines to syntactically accept things like Typescript's type annotations, but remaining agnostic to what the annotations represent semantically (giving other JS users the option of doing things with the annotations other than types, too, if they wished).
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