Well, he said "strong" :) Probably meaning a ML-derived type system, not C's or Java's.
I started with C instead of SML, which was available then, I think, because everyone I knew coded in C and they all said it's ok and a good language to learn.
The same is probably true today: you first need to know that a language exists before trying to learn it, and beginner programmers are going to only know about languages their peers (other beginners, probably) use.
Since the "strong" vs "weak" axis of type systems is already not extremely useful, as very few languages are truly weakly typed, it's usually fine.
(0) Algebraic data types, pattern matching and exhaustiveness checking rule out forgetting to handle all the qualitatively different possible outcomes of an operation.
(1) Statically typed effects rule out sneaking effects into computations without making them knowable to the user.
(2) Substructural type systems rule out resource leaks and uses after free.
(3) Rust's borrow checker rules out concurrent modifications of the same object in memory.
How usefully typed are C and Java?