Not going to bash anyone for using C -- sqlite's team has their priorities and values clearly stated (performance and discipline) -- but it's probably time for all of us to admit that not all recent tech innovation is about fads. Some of it is actually genuinely useful and helps with age-old problems (though sadly, none of it addresses all of them).
If you don’t believe me, do the converse and write your next big project completely in assembly (which is effectively untyped), and see what happens.
You currently can bend C++ into ways to have such a type system. The usability this introduced through additional complexity is just very very bad. So no one does it because bad usability means bad productivity and getting a project done with bugs is often better then getting it not done at all (sure there are exceptions!).
There is the saying that once you got a Haskell program to compile, it usually just works, and I personally found it to be true a lot. But getting it through the compiler can indeed be much more of a journey than in, say, C. And I realize that the work you have to put in to just even being able to run something can be discouraging, maybe going against a natural (or maybe just common) affinity towards tight, iterative "change-compile-try" approaches.
Still, in cases where it really matters, i.e. system software or common, but often mission-critical software like sqlite, maybe it's worth taking the jump?
We ignored the lessons and paid the price. People, to this day, still look at you weird when you say "I think you could write a game in a garbage collected language" and don't bat an eye when you say "C is dangerous, but I was very careful."
I think what killed us is that computers are expensive (and performance directly translates to the number of computers you need to buy) and security holes are free. Of course you're going to optimize for speed; optimizing for safety can save you at most zero dollars. That's just engineering.
(sarcasm)