Well, I'd argue the type system surfaces the pain faster than the untyped variant. In the untyped version, you have to read the code to see that, "it's either the number 4, or a function which may produce the number 4."

Once you see you need a weird type signature to represent 4 OR a function which produces a number, then your spidey-sense kicks in and says, "this is getting gross, maybe I should either always return just the number, or always return a function which produces the number." This avoids a branch in the code that consumes the result where you check the type and do something based on that. At a meta-level, this is the type system telling you something about your program that you might otherwise miss if you were so focused on getting something working.