Well, sure, they don't have to be. As a team you can come to an agreement on policies, and if you have the time, you can set up linting or configure your tools

Well, sure, they don't have to be. As a team you can come to an agreement on policies, and if you have the time, you can set up linting or configure your tools to make sure that they are enforced in CI. We use Rust and TypeScript at work, and for the latter we've made some effort to make it as strict as possible, and even added some eslint rules to enforce things more. But it sure is nice when the language itself does that by default for you, so you don't have to advocate for lint rules or tsconfig options and spend time setting them up. Plus, if it's built into the language, it effectively means that even people outside your organization are following the same policies as you. All that being said, your point is a valid one. It's a tradeoff and depending on what you're used to, you'll feel the pain from one approach or the other more strongly.