Well it does suck for a huge list of reasons but specifically disqualifying for being the lingua franca would be it being controlled by microsoft

It's open source. If Microsoft did anything weird it would be immediately forked ala. terraform, ElasticSearch etc.

There's so much momentum behind it from the front-end community alone it's not going anywhere.

IMO using Typescript sucks because of the node ecosystem/npm. The language itself is passable.