Precisely. PHP has tools for this too, but lack the syntax. Right now you need to to all typings in comments, and thats just as bad as jsdoc was in 2005.

This could be the way PHP could go, they just need the lexer to handle types, and not do any runtime checking at all.

But i guess that goes against what the php devs want, but it sounds so wasteful, to typecheck the same code time after time even if it passed some sort of initial "compile time step".

The current amount of typechecking might be a net efficiency improvement AFAIK. It provides a hard runtime guarantee that variables are certain types while Python has to check whether something is supported at the last possible moment. But I don't know how much use the optimizer makes of that.