Sharing some tooling & techniques I’ve been using for Forge project configuration:
Is this problem unique to me (and my colleagues)? What are other people doing for their teams? Template repos? Cookiecutter-like templating?
Sharing is caring!
Thank you for sharing this idea, it’s great!
I can confirm your problem isn’t unique. It’s a pain to wire up TypeScript, Jest, linting, etc., after forge create is finished.
That said, as an Atlassian, you might feel the pain more often than others. Personally speaking, spinning up new Forge apps isn’t as routine for me. 
However, I can see a lot of value in the type of tool you demoed. Especially if there was one owned/shared by either Atlassian or the community (or both).
Thanks for sharing, Ian!
We certainly faced this issue in the past as well. Our solution was GitHub - toolsplus/nx-forge: Atlassian Forge plugin for Nx · GitHub (docs), which is a plugin for Nx (What is Nx? | Nx). It enables Nx to understand Forge and lets you easily build Forge apps with TypeScript.
With that, you inherit all the tooling and plugins that Nx provides, including extensive TypeScript support, testing framework plugins, build tooling, bundlers, or IDE integrations.
Nx has a concept of generators, which lets you scaffold anything (projects, components, scripts, etc.).
If you want to create your own get-started setup, you could create a “create package”.
Maybe this is something to explore.