No, obviously not the same, otherwise I wouldn't be complaining. They are not even on par with Typescript, which I'm not a fan of either.
> [type hints] tell you when you make type errors
Not according to other comments I seem to be getting here. Other people are arguing type hints are not primarily for checking, but a form of notation for documentation. Seems wasteful, and I wish the Python community and tooling decided instead that they are for actually checking them.
> What do they lack that would make them useful?
Standardized, go-to tools that work in the build pipeline and that catch most errors without taking a long time to do so.
I haven't found mypy to fill these requirements. It's so bad I cannot convince my coworkers to make the effort to write more type hints.