[smcin]

For type-hinting on dataframe-like objects, people recommend pandera [0].

> The code I was maintaining / updating had long pipelines, had lots of folding, and would drift in and out of numpy quite a bit.

(Protein folding?)

Anyway yeah if your codebase is a large proprietary pipeline that thunks to and from pandas-numpy then now I understand you. But that's your very specific usecase. The claim "The only way to understand what's going on with DF code is to step it in a debugger" is in general overkill.

[0]: https://pandera.readthedocs.io/en/stable/