Nonsense. You might consider it a tradeoff, but it's a very heavily skewed one. Minor downsides on one side, huge upsides on the other.

Also I would say type hints sacrifice aesthetics, not readability. Most code with type hints is easier to read, in the same way that graphs with labelled axes and units are easier to read. They might have more "stuff" there which people might think is ugly, but they convey critical information which allows you to understand the code.

> Most code with type hints is easier to read

That has not been my experience in the past few years.

I've always been a fan of type hints in Python: intention behind them was to contribute to readability and when developer had that intention in mind, they worked really well.

However, with the release of mypy and Typescript, engineering culture largely shifted towards "typing is a virtue" mindset. Type hints are no longer a documentation tool, they are a constraint enforcing tool. And that tool is often at odds with readability.

Readability is subjective and ephemeral, type constraints (and intellisense) are very tangible. Naturally, developers are failing to find balance between the two.