Remove forced typecastings from converted Typescript files

[r00dgirl]

Typecasting (such as typing as any, or to an interface) may be inevitable when some dependencies of the file that is being converted to Typescript is not in Typescript yet, and thus may not be emitting the correct types.

This issue is a holder issue to mark those forced typecastings in the application with an issue number so we can delete them in one shot after a majority of the backend has been migrated.