A perplexing part of TypeScript for me, which led me to write a bunch of unsafe code without realizing it: the `{}` type doesn't mean "an empty object". It means something more like "any value at all". It will take any object, but also strings, numbers, etc. Very dangerous.

I'm sure that there's some weird backwards-compatibility reason for this design choice. This is the price that we pay for the sins of our forebears.

The specific way this bit me was: I defined a class that was generic over an object type. The base case of that class was supposed to have an empty object as its type parameter, so I instantiated it with {}. Oops; I effectively turned the type system off from that point forward.