I understand that the issue tracker is not for questions, which is why I've already asked this on StackOverflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53540282/why-is-never-assignable-to-every-type

But as I haven't gotten an answer to the main question in almost two weeks, I thought I'd try here as well:

The TypeScript documentation says that

The never type is a subtype of, and assignable to, every type

but doesn't mention why.

Intuitively, I would expect code like this to fail:

const useString = (str: string) => console.log('This is definitely a string:', str)
const useNever = (not_a_string: never) => useString(not_a_string)

but there are no errors, because any never value is considered a valid string.

Is this intentional? If yes, then why? :)