Comment by frogulis

This explosion of optionality types is (the most important) topic of Rich Hickey's "Maybe Not" talk. I recommend it!

The short version is: the shape of a type is inherent to the type itself, but the optionality of its members is dependent on the situation. A type system that solves this problem separates these concepts to allow for this distinction.

I _suspect_ it's possible to implement something like that in typescript but I haven't tried it myself (and I doubt it's very ergonomic).