> for anything non-trivial I find that static typing means I can be more productive, because type errors are caught straight away (rather than potentially in production), and I can be much more confident in refactoring code because I know certain kinds of errors will be caught by during type checking.

Fully agreed. It's not quite the same as Rust vs. Python, but I've pulled off several sweeping refactors and rewrites in Swift codebases that I wouldn't dream of even attempting with Objective-C.