Thank you so much for expanding on what you knew I was trying to say about introducing additional type guards. Yes for casting from JSON you'd still need to inform JS to treat something as a string or float or int before using it, but with overloads and utility types in TS it becomes much more interesting and subtle to keep the compiler happy, and that is what ultimately leads to highly maintainable code, i.e., zero problems at checkout. And zero use of "any". The reason "any" exists and is a coding horror is because JS and the kind of code people write without type checks is a horror.