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Just speaking for myself here, I didn’t realize the power of static typing for years and years because the main languages I used with “static types” were C-style; i.e. type checking without null checking. I was vaguely aware of “better” systems but since I had such a wealth of experience with compile-time type-checking catching ~zero bugs, it didn’t seem worthwhile to investigate, and my toy projects didn’t make it clear what I was missing. Having used Mypy in a large practical situation for a couple of years, one of the MAIN advantages of it is the None checking! I would get probably 60% of the utility out of a type checker that could only check for None.

Having had this experience now it’s much easier to appreciate the practical benefits of systems like Rust and Haskell, where the type checker is doing real work.