Destructuring or bracket notation on `never` shouldn't be allowed

[dwelle]

Bug Report

You can destructure or use bracket notation on never type, but you can't access props using the dot notation. It should disallow all forms of property access.

🔎 Search Terms

never destructuring destructure bracket dot notation

🕗 Version & Regression Information

• This is the behavior in every version I tried, and I reviewed the FAQ ✔️
  • 3.9.7
  • 4.1.5
  • Nightly

⏯ Playground Link

Playground link

🙁 Actual behavior

const { prop } = ({} as never); // does not error
const prop2 = ({} as never)["prop"]; // does not error

🙂 Expected behavior

TS should not allow this, same as you can't access props using the dot notation:

const prop = ({} as never).prop; // error

[gabritto]

In theory, when something has type never, it means that code is never supposed to run, because no value of type never exists (since never is the empty type). So there's theoretically nothing wrong with allowing you to do an element access or destructuring of something of type never, because that's also code that is never supposed to run.

But in some situations, it could be that something ends up having type never when the user didn't intend it, in which case the errors suggested here could be useful (see #56780 (comment)). So I think this issue comes down to how useful it would be, for detecting bugs, to have these types of errors on never.