Not my experience. We have an ML engineer at work that has only worked with python. He wanted to contribute to our rust codebase so I spent about an hour going over the basics of rust with him, and answered questions as they came up, and he was able to get up and running very quickly. He quickly became quite productive in our rust codebase.
And theoretically, I'm not sure it's that very fun to run your game, have it crash because you passed a string to a function that expected an integer, stare at a backtrace, see where that variable came from, go up the call stack a few levels, and then realize "oh, i forgot to parse that string after the user typed it in". I'd rather get a compile error that underlines the problematic code and says "this is a string, but the function expected an integer". It may be debugging compiler errors all day, but the alternative is debugging runtime errors all week.
And theoretically, I'm not sure it's that very fun to run your game, have it crash because you passed a string to a function that expected an integer, stare at a backtrace, see where that variable came from, go up the call stack a few levels, and then realize "oh, i forgot to parse that string after the user typed it in". I'd rather get a compile error that underlines the problematic code and says "this is a string, but the function expected an integer". It may be debugging compiler errors all day, but the alternative is debugging runtime errors all week.