I used to think like that until I tried.

There are areas where typing is more important: public interfaces. You don't have to make every piece of your program well-typed. But signatures of your public functions / methods matter a lot, and from them types of many internal things can be inferred.

If your code has a well-typed interface, it's pleasant to work with. If interfaces of the libraries you use are well-typed, you have easier time writing your code (that interacts with them). Eventually you type more and more code you write and alter, and keep reaping the benefits.

Typescript is pretty much the gold standard, it’s amazing how much JavaScript madness you can work around just on the typechecking level.

IMHO Python should shamelessly steal as much typescript’s typing as possible. It’s tough since the Microsoft typescript team is apparently amazing at what they do so for now it’s a very fast moving target but some day…

A type checker is only going to add limited value if you don't put the effort in yourself. If everything string-like is just a string, and if data is not parsed into types that maintain invariants, then little is being constrained and there is little to "check". It becomes increasingly difficult the more sophisticated the type system is, but in some statically typed languages like Coq, clever programmers can literally prove the correctness of their program using the type system. Whereas a unit test can only prove the presence of bugs, not their absence.

I instead think that the lack of static typing is a waste of time, since without it you can have programs that waste hours of computation due to an exception that would have been prevented by a proper type system ;)