> That was my take on this too, why do the type hints need to be there for this to work
Because (1) you need to declare the fields, and (2) it's good to do that in a way that will work with typecheckers even though they are external, and (3) there are actually two particular type declarations that are used by the implementation, even aside from external typecheckers.
Because (1) you need to declare the fields, and (2) it's good to do that in a way that will work with typecheckers even though they are external, and (3) there are actually two particular type declarations that are used by the implementation, even aside from external typecheckers.