Have you ever tried anything other than JavaScript or Typescript for front end and what was the result?
I tried Scala.js a couple of years ago, before TypeScript was popular. The results were mixed, at best. My experience was not recent, but, if I recall correctly, my two biggest stumbling blocks were tooling support and interop with standard JavaScript libraries.
On the tooling side, the major challenge was that scala.js needs to be compiled via the JVM based Scala compiler in order to produce JavaScript. That made integrating with JavaScript build tools like Gulp or Grunt fairly difficult. On top of that, I was sort of stuck writing scala.js in Eclipse since it had the best Scala plugin support. What that meant is that I had to give up IntelliJ’s awesome web development capabilities.
Integrating with third party libraries is a struggle for all of the “compile to JavaScript” solutions. A few years back, scala.js had a pretty rough integration story. Scalajs still relies on typed “facades,” Write facade types for JavaScript APIs to for integration. The problem faced is that there is not “any” type of Scala where you can skirt needing actual type information.
These two issues highlight how well TypeScript is implemented in regards to tooling and 3rd party library support. Today, (2019) I think it that TypeScript is really the only effective option for compiling to JavaScript.