I don't think the person you're responding to is implying that. Rust eliminates entire classes of bugs at compile time that plague other languages, usually out

I don't think the person you're responding to is implying that. Rust eliminates entire classes of bugs at compile time that plague other languages, usually out in production. "NoneType has no attribute 'enough'", "KeyError: this dictionary never has the key you want", etc. Multiple times per day I'll have a website fail to render simply b/c I blocked cookies (and they try to use localStorage, and the call fails, the failure isn't handled, and it bubbles all the way out, crashing the site). Sure, unit tests could help here, but that's the thing about a typechecker: it's a unit test (of sorts) that you can't avoid (which prevents laziness), and I feel it is easier in the long run (writing the equivalent unit tests in Python requires more work). IME, laziness usually wins out, and sloppy code winds up in production.