Interesting that it started out as typeless but as C came from B, they introduced types only for Python to come along and make typeless popular again. Types definitely do have their usefulness but you can certainly get by without them.
Nowadays we do byte addressing for everything, but in PDP-11 machine code a byte address and word address are different AFAIK, so char and int pointers would be incompatible.
I think strong typing with type inference hits the sweet spot of providing the safety of types, while also cutting down on boilerplate.
Also I don't know much about B but given its age I seriously doubt that it's dynamically typed like Python. I suspect that it's more like assembly: you don't have types because most of everything is effectively an integer if you squint hard enough, and the way you decide to use the data lets the compiler/CPU know how to treat it.
For instance in this snippet from TFA:
v[10] 'hi!', 1, 2, 3, 0777;
Of course it means that the type info is not actually carried by the variable like in Python. If you write `'hi!' + 'oy'` in Python you get 'hi!oy'. If you write 'hi!' + 'oy' in B I suspect that you get a garbage pointer, if not straight up undefined behaviour.