If you don’t keep a device for at least 5 years you have no real basis to talk about its issues though, like of course it’s fine when it’s basically brand new the whole time you have it

That’s not an alternative, you always need tests

Type checking for python is not bad these days, just run pyright (or mypy, I would like to prefer the non MS solution, but we have found pyright much more rigorous) on your code. Yes obviously you can still get out of it with an ignore statement, and that might occasionally be necessary for some libraries, but if you enforce no errors in pre-commit or CI then it’s only a little worse than compile time.

where messing up a space breaks everything

Messing up some character breaks everything in any language, skill issue

there is no real type system

What does “real” mean? It’s pretty robust these days.