I understand that's the stated purpose. I'm demonstrating how I feel types can pretty much become useless when integrating with an outside system.

If everything is optional, then you might as well not use a type system in the first place.

Again, there’s virtually never a reason to make everything optional/variant. It’s a conscious design choice and should be used judiciously (otherwise the API becomes difficult to use, and the same is true in a purely dynamic system).