I upvoted because I had a similar experience; however, your conclusion doesn't follow. Python's borked type checking doesn't mean optional type annotations are

I upvoted because I had a similar experience; however, your conclusion doesn't follow. Python's borked type checking doesn't mean optional type annotations are fundamentally not going to work out. In particular, if Python added support for Go-like interfaces and recursive types, it wouldn't fall over for ~99% of nontrivial cases.