I've been pushing strict mode at every place I've worked, but honestly. It catches maybe 5% of actual bugs. The real issues are logic errors, off-by-one stuff, race conditions. Strict mode catches typos in object keys and null checks. Good? Sure. Worth the week of refactoring on an existing codebase. Probably not.

The tradeoff gets worse with libraries that don't ship types or have bad ones. You end up doing as any anyway, which defeats the purpose. I've seen teams spend more time fighting the type checker than writing features.

That said. If you're building anything with auth, crypto, or payment handling, turn it on day one. The null safety alone saves you from csrf/injection mistakes. But for a crud app. Just use strict: false and don't let anyone guilt you about it.