I guess I'm more than a little prejudiced from trying to maintain all sorts of CI tools, web applications and other largeish programs somebody initially hacked

I guess I'm more than a little prejudiced from trying to maintain all sorts of CI tools, web applications and other largeish programs somebody initially hacked in Python in an afternoon and which grew to become "vital infrastructure". The lack of typing bytes you hard and the optional typing that has been shoehorned into the language is irrelevant in practice. All sorts of problems would simply have not existed if the proper language was used from the beginning, as opposed to the one where anyone can hack most easily.