Replace enums in props with union types

[mturley]

This will be a breaking change, and it's just a code cleanliness thing, but I think it'd be better to get it in sooner rather than later. Based on a discussion with @gildub a while back where he shared this article with me: https://blog.logrocket.com/put-the-typescript-enums-and-booleans-away/

It is a pain to have to import the enums used in props for certain components rather than just be able to let IntelliSense tell yo which strings are valid. TS can prevent invalid values of string types if the valid values are provided in a union type.

We should also consider watching out for the advice against booleans for state, but I'm not sure that's as important.

[gildub]

Ideally combining enums and union types get the best of both worlds.

See example https://blog.logrocket.com/put-the-typescript-enums-and-booleans-away/#comment-4566

[mturley]

Hmm, I think that helps with cases where we have more than one prop and only certain combinations of those props are valid, but for this issue I was just thinking of the basic case where we have e.g. statusType: StatusType and we could instead have statusType: 'error' | 'warning' | 'info' | 'loading' so when we consume the component we don't need to import the enum and we can just pass a string, so intellisense works right away instead of waiting for you to add the import. Like the AuthenticationStates example in the article.

I'm still wrapping my head around the best-of-both-worlds approach, is the benefit of keeping enums in there just so it's more searchable?

[mturley]

Also I think this is super low priority, I was just opening the issue so I don't forget about it

[gildub]

@mturley, I was keen to work on it because it seems to be a good practice to make code more robust by enforcing types. And also because it allows me to get stronger with types.