Modern Node, TypeScript codebase. How would you actually run it in production?
A strong answer knows what native type stripping covers and where it stops, and defends build-artifact versus run-TS with startup and observability numbers
Modern Node just runs TypeScript files directly. It strips out the type annotations and executes the JavaScript that's left, so for a lot of projects you can literally do node app.ts, no loader, no build step. Type stripping has been on by default since Node 23.6, I believe. It doesn't type-check though, so you still run tsc --noEmit in CI for that part. And the older path still works fine, you compile in CI with tsc or esbuild and deploy plain JavaScript, which keeps production simple and fast. Tools like tsx and ts-node are still around, mostly for older Node versions and for the TypeScript features the built-in stripping doesn't handle. Either way, source maps or preserved positions keep your stack traces pointing at the actual TypeScript lines.