How to resolve ERR_UNKNOWN_FILE_EXTENSION in TypeScript project

Demo

Recently I tried setting up a node project where I use ES6 import statements and top-level await, and I came across a weird problem.

While using npx ts-node index.ts to run my application, I found that it didn't know my file extension .ts:

TypeError [ERR_UNKNOWN_FILE_EXTENSION]: Unknown file extension ".ts" for /home/zhyp/Code/ts-test/src/index.ts

So after some research, I came across the esm flag (npx ts-node --esm index.ts), after running with this command, my files actually could not be found:

throw new ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND(
          ^
CustomError: Cannot find module '/home/zhyp/Code/ts-test/src/imported-file' imported from /home/zhyp/Code/ts-test/src/index.ts

So after more research, I've tried adding the .js extension to all imports, which weirdly enough worked, but not if I changed those files' extensions to .ts, because then I would need to enabled allowImportingTsExtensions in my tsconfig.json, and enable notEmit that would prevent me from using tsc to build anything.

Can anyone help me understand why exactly this setup won't work?

Necessary files to reproduce:

tsconfig.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es2022",
    "module": "es2022",
    "rootDir": "src",
    "resolveJsonModule": true,
    "allowJs": true,
    "outDir": "build",
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "strict": true,
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true
  }
}

package.json

{
  "name": "typescript-node",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "TypeScript Template with Node.js",
  "main": "src/index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "nodemon --exec 'ts-node' src/index.ts"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "@types/node": "14.14.29",
    "ts-node": "10.9.1",
    "typescript": "5.0.4"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/express": "^4.17.6",
    "nodemon": "1.18.4"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "type": "module"
}

index.ts

import test from "./imported-file";

console.log(test);

imported-file.ts

export default {};

Check you node version. When i downgraded from 20.2.0 to 19.8.1, it worked for me

By accident, I found this post, where the top answer helped me understand better on why this was not working, there are some caveats on using module: "es2022" on tsconfig.json and type: "module" on package.json.