As per the answers in this question, it is clear to me that type can be a an identifier for a property in classes/interfaces etc.
But why does Typescript permit this? It is not common in my experience that languages allow keywords to be used as identifiers. Why this aberration in TS?
I tried looking through TS docs but couldn't find an answer to this.
TypeScript is meant to be a superset of JavaScript. Every valid JS program is a valid TS program.
type is not a keyword in JS, which means if it were a "hard" keyword in TS, there would be a compatibility problem: the aforementioned relationship would be broken.
This is something the creators wanted to avoid, which is why they bent over backwards to ensure that type and a few other keywords are only special in certain contexts but valid identifiers otherwise.