Building an AST is also not a large amount of code, especially if you already have GC and some kind of runtime type discrimination. And building an AST simplifies a lot of other things you might want to do, not just type checking. You're speaking as if compilers were invented in the Obama presidency because previously computers didn't have enough memory for all their code, and were invariably many-person projects.

But, in fact, writing a compiler, with an AST and static types, is a common single-person term project for undergraduates, and it's something people have been doing for 70 years, since computers used magnetic drums and acoustic delay lines for RAM. We've learned techniques since then that make it easier, which is why undergraduates can do it now.

One notable example is Stephen C. Johnson's "portable C compiler", which was the main C compiler in the late 70s and early 80s. By my count the current version of it at https://github.com/PortableCC/pcc is a bit under 50,000 lines of code, including C, some kind of C++, and Fortran frontends and backends for 18 architectures, but not including lex and yacc. I just built it here on my phone, which required implementing getw() and putw() (maybe I don't know the right feature test macros) and #including <strings.h> with the "s" in aarch64/local2.c. The executables total about 320K, including C and C++ (no Fortran) and only aarch64.