A ton of SO answers say that to avoid problems like
Property 'toPromise' does not exist on type 'Observable'
in Angular, you have to import 'rxjs/add/operator/toPromise' which I've done until recently. In an Angular 4.2.4 project, I forgot the import and expected to see an error. It wasn't there! I did some debugging in Chrome's dev tools and saw "toPromise" on the Observable's prototype.
My question is ... how did that get there? Is this a new addition to TypeScript, Angular, or rxjs?