I tried learning Python, but got discouraged by all the magic-y stuff. I guess I like to have more control and understanding of what is going on.

Python, much like JavaScript, has tools and options that can help make it much easier to use. Type hints for instance. Type hints don’t offer quite the same safety as strongly typed languages but they do help a lot.

The problem is getting inexperienced devs to use them. Without them it doesn’t take long for the project to turn into a giant pile of dynamically typed, magic string filled spaghetti that is nearly indecipherable. When you don’t have a compiler that catches glaring errors, it’s a lot easier for those errors to make it into production undetected.