> * Types are expensive and dont tend to pay off on spikey/experimental/MVP code, most of which gets thrown away.

This is what people say, but I don't think it's correct. What is correct is that say, ten to twenty years ago, all the statically typed languages had other unacceptable drawbacks and "types bad" became a shorthand for these issues.

I'm talking about C (nonstarter for obvious reasons), C++ (a huge mess, footguns, very difficult, presumably requires a cmake guy), Java (very restrictive, slow iteration and startups, etc.). Compared to those just using Python sounds decent.

Nowadays we have Go and Rust, both of which are pretty easy to iterate in (for different reasons).