I think it would be worth mentioning that in normal use (strict mode) Pyright simply requires you to add type annotations to the declaration. Occasionally mildly annoying but IMO it's clearly the best option.

It's not "mildly annoying".

I don't enable strict mode on multiple projects because people don't want to type anything outside of function signatures.

Inferring the type from the first use is 100% the correct choice because this is what users want 99% of the time, for the rest you can provide type information.