> That sounds eerily similar to the "OOP is for large teams" defence

False. They are only similar to you. Haskell is a pure functional programming language and it is very much noun-based. Type classes like functors and monads are nouns that describe the structure of many types. Modern Haskell best practices involve way more types than other languages. Very few people operate on JSON for example, instead almost everyone will parse that JSON into a domain-specific type. The “parse don’t validate” idea is based on the idea that data that has been checked and data that has not been checked should have different types.

Rust also is decidedly not OOP: it does not even have inheritance. Yet it also has way more types than usual. Most languages would be satisfied with something like a Hashable interface, but Rust further decouples the calculation of hash values into traversing a type's fields and updating the internal state of the hash function. This results in both Hash and Hasher types. This is a wonderful design decision that helps programmers despite an increase in the number of nouns.

> a combinatoric explosion of types and their interactions

Absolutely not my experience at all. There is nothing combinatoric here. Most types do not interact with many other types. The structure is more like a tree than a complete graph.