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I don't remember much automated testing being done in those early days of PHP, and I don't see how your theory would explain the current trend back towards typed languages.

I think this is true.

Perl was one of the first hugely successful dynamic languages, though I will politely defer to Shell and TCL folks for a rigorous discussion of that claim. (:

Perl has been really serious about testing since early on, and, to my understanding, remains one of the most test-centric major languages out there.

On the other hand you could use static typing to avoid writing a lot of tests. Maybe it's a bit of preference thing, I don't mind either approach personally.

I think automated testing is more about integration and regression than code correctness. If you have a web app that connects to a Java backend, for example, static typing won't prevent issues. You need to test the API calls and the UI, and make sure the right requests are made, and the expected outcomes occur. This was done manually by QA people in the past, but it's obviously more scalable to automate it.