I swear the only the people who care about Python types are on Hacker News comments. I've never actually worked with or met someone who cared so much about it, and the ones that care at all seem just fine with type hints.
The article wasn't about the outage happening, it was about the amount of time it took to even discover what the problem was. Seems logical to assume that could be because there aren't many people left who know how all the systems connect.