I had that experience with Swift for maybe the first 2 days I used it. Nowadays I really appreciate Swift’s strictness. It just helps prevent so many stupid mistakes.
I worked on a high-profile project for my company under a strict deadline and Swift was a major part in ensuring we delivered a rock-solid implementation in record time.
The only part of the type system that I feel gets tedious is dealing with numbers, where you're continually casting back and forth between Int, Float, Double, CGFloat (at least the latter is being addressed). I get why it's strict about it due to loss of precision and the madness of floating-point numbers, but sometimes you just don't care
The number things isn't that big of an issue once you get used to considering what type your numbers should be in advance, instead of going back and forth between number types, pick one that's appropriate and stick to it.
Pure JavaScript is definitely a bit too loose for my liking, but I thought Swift went a bit too far in the other direction.