The release of Babel 7+ introduced TypeScript support.
But what are the benefits of compiling TypeScript with Babel rather than using the standard TypeScript compiler (tsc)?
If you are already using TypeScript, or starting a project from scratch, then, according to the TypeScript and Babel 7 announcement on Microsoft Blog, it's better to use the TypeScript compiler:
Using the TypeScript compiler is still the preferred way to build TypeScript. While Babel can take over compiling/transpiling – doing things like erasing your types and rewriting the newest ECMAScript features to work in older runtimes – it doesn’t have type-checking built in, and still requires using TypeScript to accomplish that. So even if Babel builds successfully, you might need to check in with TypeScript to catch type errors. For that reason, we feel tsc and the tools around the compiler pipeline will still give the most integrated and consistent experience for most projects.
This means that the advantage of Babel 7+ supporting TypeScript is mainly for who is already using Babel and wants to write TypeScript code without changing their build system entirely:
[...] if you’re already using Babel, or interested in the Babel ecosystem, and you want to get the benefits of TypeScript like catching typos, error checking, and the editing experiences you might’ve seen in the likes of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, this is for you!
More info (and istructions) about TypeScript support in Babel can be found at the official Babel website:
https://babeljs.io/docs/en/next/babel-preset-typescript.html
https://babeljs.io/docs/en/next/babel-plugin-transform-typescript.html