I think it's telling that Python blew up in popularity back when it didn't have type hints, and also when it was competing with other statically-typed languages

I think it's telling that Python blew up in popularity back when it didn't have type hints, and also when it was competing with other statically-typed languages out in the wild. A programming language that did away with a lot of ceremony turned out to be useful for a lot of people. I think static types are useful in general, and they pay off fairly quickly for code at scale. But I also think the overhead of writing statically-typed code is not 0, and there's a long tail of small scripts and applications that don't benefit from being statically typed, and that's where something like Python is useful.