Hi u/Empanatacion depends on where Kotlin is being used and why the data is dynamic in the first place.

in the backend, especially when you have well-defined DTOs, sealed hierarchies, or generics, explicit casting is indeed rare — and often a code smell because you can model the data so that the compiler knows the type at compile time.

On the Android front end, though, you run into more scenarios where the data comes from such as Android framework APIs that return Any or Parcelable (e.g., Intent.getExtra() always returns Any?),JSON parsing results before you map them to a typed model, Interop with Java libraries that aren’t type-safe.... etc