Meta-comment: I believe the difference in opinion here (which seems to recur, over and over, and has for decades) is because the job title of "software engineer" actually encompasses many different job duties. For some engineers, their job is to "make it work"; they do not care about the thousand cases where their code is buggy, they care about the one case where it solves a customer's problem that couldn't previously be solved. For other engineers, their job is to "make it work right"; they do not care about getting the software to work in the first place (which, at their organization, was probably solved years ago by someone who's now cashed out and sitting on a beach), they care about fixing all the cases where it doesn't work right, where the accumulated complexity of customer demands has led to bugs. The first is in charge of taking the software from zero to one; the second is in charge of taking the software from one to infinity.

For the former group, error checking just gets in their way. Their job is not to make the software perfect, it's only to make it satisfy one person's need, to replace something that previously wasn't computerized with something that was. Oftentimes, it's not even clear what that "something" is - it's pointless to write something that perfectly conforms to the spec if the spec is wrong. So they like languages like Python, Lisp, Ruby, Smalltalk, things that are highly dynamic and let you explore a design space quickly without getting in your way. These languages give you tools to do things; they don't give you tools to prevent you from doing things.

The second group works in larger teams, with larger requirements and greater complexity, and a significant part of their job description is dealing with bugs. If a significant part of the job description is dealing with bugs, it makes sense to use machines to automate checking for them. And so they like languages like Rust, C++, Haskell, Ocaml, occasionally Go or Java.

The two groups do very little work in common (indeed, most of the time they can't stand to work in the opposing culture), but they come together on programming message boards, which don't distinguish between the two roles, and hence we get endless debates.