Ask HN: Thoughts on Flow

I spent the last week using Flow at work. This is the first static type system I've used. It was much more challenging than expected and yielded no (perceptible) practical benefit. I lost a day trying to resolve Flow errors in seemingly simple code. The error messages are cryptic and sometimes the stack traces are misleading. Is this generally the experience with static type systems? Static typing appeals to me and I really want to like/get it. But after a week, Flow has left me feeling defeated.