Apply changes of this to the starters repo

[denizenging]

Apply the changes that are useful for typescript to the starters repo. Need to get into cookiecutter and crust a little bit.

Also, what do you think of the way we manage monorepos here? I think it is pretty minimalistic, and it will get better over time as pnpm adds support for some goodies for monorepos (such as using the same dependency version across subprojects).

We don't need to use anything like nx or lerna, since we can achieve the things we want from them with a more minimalist approach (such as test caching; I'm sure jest has something for that).