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A thing to keep in mind in these situations is that making the system a bit more type safe may be more personally satisfying for the engineers. They may see that as a more worthy goal than fixing `n` additional bugs.

Same thing with premature, or otherwise unnecessary, optimization. Sometimes it's just fun!

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Author here. I fully support prioritizing a project because it's fun! We need to own that rationale though.

In OP's situation, it sounds like their counterpart is trying to argue that this project is a "good thing to do" for the user/system. In reality, it's a bit of code hygiene that makes it more fun to do work (still important [1]).

That dissonance hides the true value of the work and makes it difficult to reason about.

[1] https://blog.harterrt.com/bad-tools

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