[CipherThrowaway]

Your problem isn't that you're old. It's that you don't understand how little you know in this space and this renders you too arrogant to learn anything new. New to you, that is, because the concept of pattern matching is actually many decades old. You encounter it in undergraduate PLT coursework, famous comp sci textbooks like SICP, and virtually any language outside the imperative/OO lineage.

Thinking you have an I-told-you-so moment with static typing and dynamic languages only shows you don't understand the details and tradeoffs in the design space. For example TypeScript's approach to static typing is very different to Java's and these differences reflect consideration of the problems being solved, JavaScript's specific use cases, its history and the path dependence of its design. Because these details are invisible to you the whole thing is simplified in your mind to "everyone is switching to static typing just like I said they should!" In fact this type of prognostication was never useful or meaningful. The hard part wasn't deciding to build static typing onto JavaScript. The hard part was determining specifically what that should look like, how it would fit nicely with the language and then doing the work of building it and driving adoption.

TypeScript is successful not because it is static typing but because it is a form of static typing that's exceptionally well suited to JavaScript and its use cases. If people like you had their way it would have been a failed attempt to bolt a Java style type system onto JavaScript, worsening the design debt in a language and ecosystem that is already loaded with it. This already happened on a smaller scale with classes in ES6 which were driven by Java devs writing JavaScript and wanting something familiar instead of trying to understand the language.

You might be right that adding pattern matching to Java isn't a great idea but at the moment your disagreement is based in ignorance. You've been given ample explanations of pattern matching in this thread. Put down the ego and take some time to learn on your own.