Or in other words, the presence of a static typing ecosystem is one of the advantages Node has over Elixir. So while the original commenter might not care that Elixir lacks static typing, they should care because it increases productivity.
The only reason I would want types is for specific error types that I could ideally match against instead of them being raised (in Node.js or Typescript).
In Elixir you have the option of calling functions that raise vs functions that return an error tuple so there's no contention there (the difference between function() (this does error tuple) and function!() (this raises).
Elixir also has this idea of a typespec and I have never felt I needed more, personally.
Typespecs in Elixir (combined with Dialyzer) give you a very limited version of what TypeScript offers. From what I understand Dialyzer is designed to only raise an error when it's absolutely certain that you're mistaken about the types in your program. While this does prevent Dialyzer from complaining about false positives, it only catches the most trivial of bugs [1].
Also even with Elixir's typespecs, static typing is only fully useful if the entire ecosystem around a language embraces it. If some of the libraries you use don't ship with type definitions, it's going to be difficult for any static analysis tool to do a decent job. Almost every major JS library either ships with its own types, or has quality third party types available via Definitely Typed. It doesn't seem like the Elixir community has really embraced static typing to the same extent that TypeScript developers have. The creator of Phoenix for example hates dialyzer [2].
I was referring to Elixir's blog post on static types where the creator of Elixir José Valim wrote: "The Dialyzer project, implemented in Erlang and available for Elixir projects, chose to have no false positives. However, that implies certain bugs may not be caught. At this point in time, it seems the overall community would prefer a system that flags more potential bugs, even if it means more false positives." [1]
From my experience with TypeScript, you really want your type checker to be eager about complaining about type issues, which is why so many people turn on strict mode. In fact, occasionally I'll have to suppress a false positive error with a @ts-expect-error comment.
But even assuming Dialyzer is as good as TypeScript, have you found that the libraries you use actually have quality type definitions? The few times I've used a JS library without type definitions it ended up breaking type inference, and infecting the codebase with the any type, which renders the type checker basically useless. How has your experience been in regards to that with Elixir?
If you're into trying out static typing in Elixir, please check out https://github.com/esl/gradient. It's still experimental, but already functional. We're happy to get any feedback or, better yet, contributions.