Extra stuff like type checking and annotations are definitely not the reason why python became that popular and widely adapted and used, but it certainly doesn't hurt to add and use them.
To be clear, I'm not expecting people to start adding generics to their quick hacked together Python scripts (in fact please don't do that). Instead, if you're building a library or maintaining a larger Python codebase, a lot of these start becoming very useful. A lot of the typing features I mentioned are already used by Python under the hood, and that a lot of Python developers just take for granted.
To be clear, I'm not expecting people to start adding generics to their quick hacked together Python scripts (in fact please don't do that). Instead, if you're building a library or maintaining a larger Python codebase, a lot of these start becoming very useful. A lot of the typing features I mentioned are already used by Python under the hood, and that a lot of Python developers just take for granted.
Case in point, the python-opencv (https://github.com/opencv/opencv-python) library has basically no types and it's an absolute pain to work with.
BTW thats a really good SO thread, thanks for linking it!