How many people die planetwide every year?

"When an OP rejects your edit, please do not edit it back in!" Correspondingly, when a user repeatedly does try to edit, understand that something in your framing isn't working right, and you should reconsider it.

Let's make the example even easier. function convertDate<T extends string | undefined>(isoDate?: string): T { return undefined } 'undefined' is assignable to the constraint of type 'T' Means: What you return in the function (undefined), matches the constraints of your generic type parameter T (extends string | undefined). , but 'T' could be instantiated with a different subtype of constraint 'string | undefined'. Means: TypeScript does not consider that as safe. What if you defined your function like this at compile time: // expects string return type according to generics // but you return undefined in function body const res = convertDate<string>("2019-08-16T16:48:33Z") Then according to your signature, you expect the return type to be string. But at runtime that is not the case! This discrepancy that T can be instantiated with a different subtype (here string) than you return in the function (undefined) is expressed with the TypeScript error.

Both of the below are valid as far as T extends (...args: any[]) => any goes logFn((a, b) => a + b) logFn((a, b, c) => c) But if you refer back to the example I gave, the inner definition as: return (a, b) => fn(a, b); So option 2. will throw an error here, which is why typescript is warning you about it.