I guess the fact that they're hints doesn't really bother me when you're doing static analysis. You can have strong typing with a weak type system like C and Go where the types will be rigidly enforced but they're also not expressive. There end up being lots of things you can't express in the type system which leads you to do things like void* or `any` with manual casting.

But a fully type-hinted Python codebase is extremely expressive, the times where you have to opt-out of the type system is much much rarer and the types you end up writing are much more specific so you get stronger guarantees. It's not without downsides but I don't think it's "because they're hints you can't trust them" since lots of languages erase their types on compilation.