That’s true, even if the specific example doesn’t hold, the core concept does. If I needed to implement a bird detector today, I’d make an API call to AWS Rekognition or an equivalent service. It would take me a day or two to learn the API and then maybe 4 hours to actually implement. But if you asked me to implement a bird species detector, I’m pretty sure there is no off the shelf API capable of that, and I would indeed need months or years.

I prefer JavaScript personally, but it’s time to acknowledge that TypeScript has won. If you want to contribute and succeed as a developer in the JS ecosystem, you need to learn TS, like it or not.