At work we recently did a timed programming problem solving competition. 20 Teams got 1 hour each to solve multiple levels of the same problems.
If you're looking at the kind of requirements that can be implemented in under an hour, of course a stronger, more static type system isn't likely to gain you much. It's highly unlikely that such a program is going to have lots of different people working on it over a period of possibly years, or that it's going to use lots of different but possibly related data structures, or that it's going to develop libraries with hundreds or thousands of little utility functions for working with those data structures.
However, drawing conclusions about the merits of a stronger, more static type system based on this sort of challenge is like arguing that a language where all code has to be in defined modules and functions is much less efficient than a scripting language like Python because in the latter you can write a "Hello, world!" program in literally one line.
If you're looking at the kind of requirements that can be implemented in under an hour, of course a stronger, more static type system isn't likely to gain you much. It's highly unlikely that such a program is going to have lots of different people working on it over a period of possibly years, or that it's going to use lots of different but possibly related data structures, or that it's going to develop libraries with hundreds or thousands of little utility functions for working with those data structures.
However, drawing conclusions about the merits of a stronger, more static type system based on this sort of challenge is like arguing that a language where all code has to be in defined modules and functions is much less efficient than a scripting language like Python because in the latter you can write a "Hello, world!" program in literally one line.