Support for type hints was introduced in Python 3.5. Type hints make it easier to read and review code in my opinion. Also an IDE may discover a potential bug sooner. Yet, as PEP 484 says: "It should also be emphasized that Python will remain a dynamically typed language, and the authors have no desire to ever make type hints mandatory, even by convention."
Mypy is used in lint-python.sh to do the type checking. The package is standard so there is little chance that it will be abandoned. Mypy checks that type hints in source code are correct when they are not, it fails with an error.
Useful resources:
* https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/typing.html
* https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/