This was the thing that started to bring me around to optional typing as well. It makes the most sense to me as a form of documentation - it's really useful to know what types are expected (and returned) by a Python function!

If that's baked into the code itself, your text editor can show inline information - which saves you from having to go and look at the documentation yourself.

I've started trying to add types to my libraries that expose a public API now. I think it's worth the extra effort just for the documentation benefit it provides.

I shouldn't have said it's a waste of time period, cause every project I work on does have static typing in two very important places: the RPC or web API (OpenAPI, gRPC, whatever it is), and the relational database. But not in the main JS or Py code. That's all I've ever needed.

I did try migrating a NodeJS backend to TS along with a teammate driving that effort. The type-checking never ended up catching any bugs, and the extra time we spent on that stuff could've gone into better testing instead. So it actually made things more dangerous.