I agree with the general observation that shorter code is better. Concision is a great virtue. A typical example is the move to a table-driven scheme from one that has everything programmed in the code. Adding type information doesn't take much extra time, or result in much extra code. Type information also improves readability and, hence, ease of maintenance, reuse, and modification.
Type declarations make the text so much more clear.
I don't see why anyone would want to renounce its benefits. But that's not necessarily the case. You can have a very incremental and extremely fast recompilation cycle with full type checking. Second, effective static typing requires an appropriate type system. But this objection goes away with a well-designed type system.