Which use cases are those?? Are any of them actually real life, practical use cases?
In usual Javascript patterns, this intuition works, but it's not sound, since arrays are mutable; the function could write to the array, appending a Dog or a Potoo or a Jellyfish- valid for an Animal[] argument, but not sound for a Cat[].
In practice, in most JS code I've seen, arrays are constructed once and then are passed around as immutable collections, so Typescript's unsoundness saves a lot more casting than it introduces errors.
At one point long ago I did some experiments with this, and found that the most of the unique method signatures necessary to represent the data structures we are familiar with are concentrated in the mutators.
That is, the interface differences between read only data structures are pretty small. So you don’t double the surface area by splitting read from write. It’s more like 25%, and this might be partially offset by simplifications in code that has to scan multiple types of collections.
The example seems like a valid case. The type of event is expressed in a separate parameter, so being strict here requires pointless casting and doesn't actually make things safer.
Whether you think this type weakness is worth the downsides is up to you.