If you explicitly mark types at lower levels, or just use typed libs, it's not very easy to pass the wrong type somewhere and have it still accidentally work. The most automatic type inference I can think of today is in Rust, which is all about safety, or maybe C++ templates count too.
No, I said there's nothing that exists right now that's theoretically better. Typescript isn't. It'd be great if TS's type inference were smart enough that it basically takes no additional dev input vs JS, but until then, it's expensive to use. It's also bolted on awkwardly, but that's changing soon. Could also imagine JS getting some nice Py features like list comp.
Also, generally when people complain that JS won the web, it's not because they prefer TS, it's cause they wanted to use something else and can't.
Never used Elm, but... no variables, kinda like Erlang, which I've used. That has its appeal, but you're not going to find a consensus that this is better for web.
Nothing is even theoretically better than Javascript for its intended use cases, web frontends and backends. Mainly because it went all-in on event loop parallelism early-on, which isn't just for usability but also performance. And didn't go all-in on OOP unlike Java, and has easy imports/packages unlike Python. It has some quirks like the "0 trinity," but that doesn't really matter. No matter how good you are with something else, it still takes more dev time ($$$) than JS.
Now it's been forever since I used PyTorch or TF, but I only remember TF 1.x being more like "why TF isn't this working." At some point I didn't blame myself, I blamed the tooling, which TF2 later admitted. It seemed like no matter how skilled I got with TF1, it'd always take much longer than developing with PyTorch, so I switched early.
If it's not something that needs extensive testing, I'd rather maintain that codebase than a "proper" one. Data science people don't pump out 100 files with 20 layers of OOP, and they don't know how to use Redux or whatever overkill navigation lib. It'll be a main.py that just does what you want. Maybe there will be copy-pasted code, but even that can be more readable sometimes.