> I also think static typing has the benefit of enforced self-documentation a bit, so other developers know just by checking the type what sort of data they should expect to see in there, and not trying to give it garbage to begin with. Granted good variable naming and proper documentation would alleviate that, but that's never been fully consistent at any organization I've ever worked for.
I don’t think naming is fully alleviated by static typing; however, on the other hand, static typing allows IDEs to offer better refactoring capabilities, since they can presumably build such functionality on top of the compiler’s structured syntax tree representations.
As an example, lately I fairly frequently find myself using VS Code capabilities to rename TS identifiers as my code evolves. It always handles correctly the scope and everything, I’m sure it’d be more error-prone with plain JS.
Agreed about statically typed code being more self-documenting in general. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword in that it may give an illusion that your project is easier to understand than it actually is, but it usefully shifts the focus of documentation from minute details of code itself to subject domain specifics and how you represent them in your architecture.