[achou]

The first example can happen in TypeScript; foo has type

  (() => Promise<void>) | undefined

admittedly it may not be all that common to have a function-valued variable that may be undefined, but it happened in the code base I was working with.

In the last example, you're right that TypeScript will catch this at compile time. My point was to show how this compile time error can happen from refactoring to use optional chaining, and one easy solution in this case.