In the end you need to some kind of compiler that does proper, rigorous and unapologetic type checking. If Alpaca could reach critical mass I could convince our project leader to use it, which would solve the problem entirely.

Sure, the ecosystem would likely remain the same in that the majority of people simply don't actually have any familiarity with strong, static typing, but at the very least you can now set up these guards yourself and you can have code that is much more likely to be safe and good.