I think you have a valuable point. I kinda purposely avoided explicitly defining what JSDoc is. Instead I'm relying on "the JSDoc we're all familiar with". I said in the post that if your IDE is giving you intellisense from JSDoc comments then you are almost certainly already using TypeScript. That's about as close as I got to defining the JSDoc I'm talking about

But given that JSDoc doesn't have any sort of formal spec, I think the distinction you're making is more of a historical than a technical one.

This was an interesting and useful post but you’re kind of losing the plot here in these comments defending against what should be a straightforward minor correction.

JSDoc has been around for more than twenty years and most implementations have never had most of the capabilities you’re describing.

It is actively misleading for you to say that JSDoc has these capabilities when you’re referring specifically and exclusively to TypeScript’s implementation of JSDoc, or you could say TypeScript’s alternative JSDoc syntax. Closure always used language like that in their documentation, and explicitly called out that they had diverged from standard JSDoc, as they should have. TypeScript’s own documentation sometimes refers to it as their superset of JSDoc, again recognizing that “JSDoc” actually does mean something specific and different.

The fact that there may not be a formal technical spec doesn’t mean you’re not wrong and it’s preposterous to suggest that.

There was established tooling and documentation going back 25 years, and it doesn’t somehow not count just because they didn’t give you a formal grammar…