What makes CL/Clojure really work is that your editor (emacs usually, but there’s other options now) connects to the live program and has access to the entire runtime environment. So, you can do a lot of the things other languages need static types for via introspection (e.g. autocomplete: CL just asks the running program what functions are available that matches the current pattern and returns a list).

Secondly, since I’ve learned statically typed languages, I already have a mental model for how they make you structure your code, except dynamically typed languages make patterns easy that would require something like dependent types to check (see how complicated Typescript is, because it has to be able to model JS idioms). My experience is that a lot of the value of static types isn’t in the checking but in the modeling aspect: if you follow the general patterns you’d use in Haskell (represent algorithms like “apply a function to each member of the list” as functions), you reduce the amount of thought it takes to see the program is correct by splitting it up. For example, if I have this pattern in my imperative codebase:

    let result = []
    for (let idx = 0; idx <= input.length; idx++) {
      result.push(input[idx]+1);
    }
    return result

I have at least three things mixed up together: accessing each member of a list (and there's an easy to miss off-by-one error in this implementation), transforming that member and building up a result. If I translate this to a functional style, it's easier to see that the implementation is correct:

    const inc = v => v+1
    . . .
    return list.map(inc)

Looking at this code, I can break down correctness into three questions: is list.map implemented correctly? is inc (the transformation) implemented correctly? And, assuming both are correct, are these two functions combined in the correct way? Types definitely can help here but my experience is that 90% of the benefit isn't the _checking_, it's the code structure you end up with as a result.[1]

Now, if this is true, why do I prefer dynamically typed languages? Well, it comes down to two things: I find the "live programming" model of CL/Clojure more productive and roughly equal to types when it comes to checking correctness (and I don't think it's just me, I've seen various papers, etc. that claim Haskell and Clojure have roughly equal defect rates); and, I find the patterns I like in CL/Clojure/Javascript require much more sophisticated type checkers to actually validate, and such type-checkers have a huge up-front learning cost and still add a lot of boilerplate that exists mainly to convince the type-checker that you know what you're doing.

Finally, in a language with macros, you can roll your own static guarantees: one project I worked on was doing a bunch of calculations inside a database. We hit an edge case where the DB's idea of a week didn't match our requirements. As a result, I wrote a code generator that generated Clojure functions and DB queries simultaneously. In this situation, if you assume the code generator is correct, you have a compile-time guarantee that the Clojure versions of the queries are equivalent to the calculations being done inside the DB.

[1]: This page surveys a bunch of studies on the question of dynamic v. static types and finds the evidence in favor of static types to be surprisingly small https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/