I get the sentiment, but ime this speaks more to architecture and code organization than the merits of static typing. It's always possible to skip type checking

I get the sentiment, but ime this speaks more to architecture and code organization than the merits of static typing. It's always possible to skip type checking by designing the software to be modular enough that unreachable code isn't included in the local build. Like updating data structures should never result in days of work before you can run simple tests. Create a new build artifact that only pulls in the new data structures and the software modules you're working on (and their tests). If you need to pull in the universe to run any unit tests, they aren't unit tests.