[roberttod]

I remember such a project, and due to our large and aging TypeScript frontend projects it would have added a couple of weeks to adjust all the types affected. All IDs in many places deep in code caused thousands of errors from the mismatch which was a nightmare. I can't remember exactly why it was so tough to go through them all, but we were under intense time pressure.

To speed things up we decided to correct the ID types for the server response, which was key since they were generated from protobuf. But we kept everything using number type IDs everywhere else, even though they would actually be strings, which would not cause many issues because there ain't much reason to be doing numeric operations on an ID, except the odd sort function.

I remember the smirk on my face when I suggested it to my colleague and at the time we knew it was what made sense. It must have been one of the dumbest solutions I've ever thought of, but it allowed us to switch the type eventually to string as we changed code, instead of converting the entire repos at once. Such a Javascript memory that one :)