Is this based on your experience or is it just an assumption? I only have anecdotes, but it does not reflect your claims, rather the exact opposite. A lot of the boilerplate code doesn’t need to be type annotated, but annotating the main business logic doesn’t take more time and is not more complicated, but instead type annotations help write code that is more clear, more obvious, and it adds some kind of documentation.

Nonsense. You get the simplification and faster development times of knowing some variable types statically, plus the performance improvements for the compiler which can move the type checks from runtime to compile-time. Plus all the new optimization possibilities.

Common Lisp showed you the way. But almost none looked at it. Only PHP did.