Yeah it’s a silly line of reasoning. The transformations of TS -> JS are a lot smaller and simpler than C-> asm / machine code; it’s basically just removing type annotations. Now minification and optimization can make the output a lot more terse, but that can be done for JS too. And it’s not as complicated and detached from the source as an optimizing compiler is.

Let's not act like it's the same thing. I'm not strictly talking about just Typescript, I'm saying that if you work with these technologies every day it would be wise to go look at their Vite plugins to see how they transform your code and be sure to understand it. It's nice to have magic but it's nicer to use the magic if we have demystified it first.

And I don't know about you, but I occasionally do open compiled ELF files in a hex editor and I certainly did at first when I was learning more. That's a good practice also.