No, you are right, it is possible.
But it would be significantly more expensive.
So I should probably preface and say that it is not possible within the budget I have (We are ~2 full time developing and maintaining everything on a 140k LOC platform spanning from infrastructure, backend, multiple frontends).
Yeah, it just means those teams had to do a lot of work themselves which type systems do automatically. Given that the entire point of computing is automating things which a human could have done by hand, it makes more sense to talk about cost rather than capability.
That feels more like you're being abused rather than a framework problem.
We are not really over worked. Nobody puts in more than 30 hours, and we deliver the features the business need.
However, we do have types and don't do type coercion. Types are sound full stack db -> backend -> frontends. We don't do any funky things. We don't use SSR (as the business does not require it). We test well, but not too much. We keep a sane architecture.
We can also skip out on a lot of project shenanigans and mostly focus on our work.
We don't (yet) use AI as a part of our workflows, and frankly, I don't see we can keep this way of working with the current gen AI.