> All the functions taking a string that might end up being a PhoneNumber need to be highly defensive

Yeah, I can't relate at all with not using a type for this after having to write gross defensive code a couple of times e.g. if it's not a phone number you've got to return undefined or throw an exception? The typed approach is shorter, cleaner, self-documenting, reduces bugs and makes refactoring easier.

>But the context this type of an alias should exist in is one where a string isn't turned into a PhoneNumber until you've validated it.

Even if you don't do any validation as part of the construction (and yeah, having a separate type for validated vs unvalidated is extremely helpful), universally using type aliases like that pretty much entirely prevents the class of bugs from accidentally passing a string/int typed value into a variable of the wrong stringy/inty type, e.g. mixing up different categories of id or name or whatever.

one issue is it’s not a type alias but a type encapsulation. This have a cost at runtime, it’s not like in some functionnals languages a non cost abstraction.