> Look at shell scripting. Imagine trying to apply a type system to shell scripts. It wouldn't map cleanly at all because (almost) everything is a string, and the operations define how those strings are interpreted - not the data itself.

Everything is a string because every program deserializes and then serializes data from and into a string. But you still have expectation encoded into the tools. If not, they wouldn't be able to work together. Static typing is about making these expectations explicit.