I wonder if this is a generational thing. Learning programming in the 1980s with Pascal, static typing was just seen as a fact of life. When I discovered dynamic typing/scripting languages in the 1990s it was a revelation -- it made programming much more productive and perhaps equally as important, fun.
The current generation grew up on scripting languages and now this current return of static typing is seen as something new and exciting rather than a return to the old days. Computing has recurrent ideas/fads. In the 1970s/1980s, a popular strain of Pascal was UCSD Pascal, which ran on a virtual machine (the p-machine). People realized that this was inefficient and moved to native binaries. Kind of what's happening now with JVM and .NET as the new wave of programming languages make native binaries again.
The current generation grew up on scripting languages and now this current return of static typing is seen as something new and exciting rather than a return to the old days. Computing has recurrent ideas/fads. In the 1970s/1980s, a popular strain of Pascal was UCSD Pascal, which ran on a virtual machine (the p-machine). People realized that this was inefficient and moved to native binaries. Kind of what's happening now with JVM and .NET as the new wave of programming languages make native binaries again.