Earlier quoted context omitted.
5% of 'released' software is quite a lot, more importantly it's a class of errors that definitely should not exist. This is a 'bug' in the language effectively there just isn't any real upside. Python has a few of these things, which is really sad.
It's a class of error that would be caught by even the most basic testing. A better title for the article is that 5% of 666 Python repos have typos that demonstrate the code in them that is completely untested. It doesn't matter which language it is: untested code is untested code in any language.
You could say that about anything and everything in software.
It's not acceptable that testing needs to be run for something the language should 100% accommodate.
The whole point of the language is to provide algorithmic clarity and avoid these things.
This isn't really an issue of 'trade offs' is just a bad feature of the language that should have been remedied more than a decade ago.
The lack of proper declaration of variables is even more absurd, there's only downside to that.