I make great use of value objects in my applications but there are things I needed to do to make it ergonomic/performant. A "small" application of mine has over 100 value objects implemented as classes. Large apps easily get into the 1000s of classes just for value objects. That is a lot of boilerplate. It's a lot of boxing/unboxing. It'd be a lot of extra typing than "stringly typed" programs.

To make it viable, all value objects are code-generated from model schemas, and then customized as needed (only like 5% need customization beyond basic data types). I have auto-upcasting on setters so you can code stringly when wanted, but everything is validated (very useful for writing unit tests more quickly). I only parse into types at boundaries or on writes/sets, not on reads/gets (limit's the amount of boxing, particularly on reading large amounts of data). Heavy use of reflection, and auto-wiring/dependency injection.

But with these conventions in place, I quite enjoy it. Easy to customize/narrow a type. One convention for all validation. External inputs are by default secure with nice error messages. Once place where all values validation happens (./values classes folder).