Alice: "Doing X will prevent bugs like Y!"
Bob: "Oh, but it does nothing for bugs like Z. I just won't bother at all, then".
Why would you not want to try and remove an entire class of bugs if it were within your power to do so? Just look at all the effort companies like Facebook have poured into exactly this kind of problem with things like Hack and Flow (which make use of OCaml).
Haskell or ML style static typing is very useful, completely changes the way you do things and gives you many guarantees.
C or Java static typing is almost useless with regards to bugs (see null) and serves mostly to annoy you. It has many of extra costs of stronger static typing, but gives you very little of the benefits.
To repeat, you can harden a code base without rewriting it by using static analysis tools. This is not as true with static typing.
There is, of course, a tremendous pile of things it doesn't do well, and a bunch of ways you can make it less useful for yourself, but the last C project I worked on I found it a tremendous help in refactoring compared to the nightmare I would have had without it.