Yeah but in practice basically all JS code in the wild is strongly typed since the community has long since decided that relying on implicit type coercion is a massive footgun.

Also I think Python’s truthy/falsey semantics make it dangerously close to being weakly typed.

All that means is that you get more exceptions raised when you use ==. It doesn't help performance at all, it doesn't even really confer anything about types, only that __eq__ is implemented between fewer types.

Python exceptions are low-cost. It has to be that way because every for loop in Python throws an exception.

Python's type system is not more strongly typed than JavaScript's in any way that makes it easier to optimise.