Every single typed system I have ever worked on, no matter how poorly designed, has been easier to alter than the vast majority of ruby, python, perl, php, and elixir that I've worked on
I have the opposite experience:
Inserting a library that wraps an existing one to add new features has been a nightmare in every statically typed language I’ve used — including times it’s virtually impossible because you’d need the underlying library to understand the wrapper type in its methods.
In Python (with duck typing), that’s a complete non-issue.
Can you give an example? I think part of the problem is that mixins and such are so hard to do in most statically typed languages that programmers just don’t code things that way.
I see your point - I certainly find myself reaching for clever high level patterns less in typescript than I do in JavaScript because complex typing can get in the way. But also, programs that make heavy use of metaprogramming are often, also, harder to read and debug. There’s something very nice and straightforward about explicit, concrete types.
I'm not the person you asked the question to but I had an unpleasant experience with Typescript recently.
I used a HTTP requests library in a nuxtjs app (probably nuxt's native library) and I spent too much of my time conjuring the request and response types that would please the type checker. It was extremely frustrating because the code would work in Javascript but the compiler wouldn't accept it because of typing.
I can't give you the details because I'm not at my computer now but the type was a mix of HTTP verbs and the structure of the JSON response. I gave up after a while and rewrote the code using fetch and no types. If they stand between me and the final result they can go down the drain.