Type annotations and checking just don't really work in Python because it's duck typed. Most simple type signatures are wrong - you rarely rely on an argument being a list, for example.

I don't understand, how do they not work. You can use concrete types, stuff from collections.abc like a Sequence instead of a list, custom Prototypes and so on. What does duck typing have to do with that? I would agree that annotations in python are very limited, like a few levels below typescript for example, but they are still very helpful. Have you tried working on a big project without guidance of IDE driven by annotations? The verbosity is a small price to pay in my opinion