Having worked at two unicorn-ish startups that were founded and grew up on Python stacks I specifically want to work on a statically typed backend for my next job. I'm tired of the mishmash that is a large mature Python codebase.
I find vscode + pyright useful for static typing. My only complaint is that pylance is closed source.
Better performance - transpile to a statically typed language. Forces you to stick to a small/sane subset of python.
In addition to the static typing, by choosing an MVC project with an Entity Framework (EF) backend you get something similar to active record, with full-stack views where your database can be connected to your frontend if you like, scaffolding, migrations, seeding, relationships with navigational properties defined in your models, routing by discovery/convention, validation by model attributes, strongly-typed views, out-of-the-box client-side validation based on the same attributes, and server hot reload ('dotnet watch').
Through generic types and EF you don't need to write ORM or serialiser/mapping stuff, and at the same time you gain self-contained releases (no framework installations needed on the server) and a very performant stack with great language features.
Core may come from Microsoft, but it's free, open source, cross-platform, fast, and supported (plus Visual Studio has a free community edition). It's seen as an enterprise thing, but is a fantastic option for small projects too.
However as all the DotNet languages use the same DotNet Core framework (which despite the name is not necessary on the deploy servers) they use the same libraries and modules. So whilst I don't know how seamlessly they integrate into the F# code, they should certainly be available.