Programming

Can’t you just use try/catch blocks

No, because what if whatever you're calling is updated and suddenly it throws a new exception where before it didn't? Python or JavaScript or other interpreted languages will never warn you about that.

if the data structure of whatever you’re working with isn’t what you expected?

That sounds like a whole lot of boilerplate I have to write to verify every time that something is what I expect. Static typing does that for me much easier and more reliably.

Some languages like Rust have so good type systems that often when a program compiles, it just works. You don't have to run the code to know that it functions if you only make a small change.

What kind of systems have you worked in? In small systems, the static analysis doesn't matter as much, but the benefits become bigger and bigger the more code there is to analyze.

Let me reverse this question and ask what is the benefit of dynamic typing? What is gained from vaguely defined objects?

The purpose of typed languages is to ensure the bare minimum when it comes to safety. That when you're accessing a field of an object that field is real, and that field is always going to be an int or a string.

Try/catch only goes so far before it becomes way more cumbersome than necessary, as is checking every field of an object.

Typescript is an example of a language that does static typing poorly, because by design it has to. It's a quick bandaid fix over an inherently awful language.