> Microsoft's Pyright extension is useless without type hints.

I do lots of work with both annotated and unannotated Python. Pylance (which is what is built into VSCode and based on Pyright) is not useless on unannotated code.

> It reminds me of those free-to-play MMORPGs, where you have to pay to unlock their entire content.

Well, yeah, there are things that type annotations allow that you can't statically determine without them. That's...rather the point.