Here is my rating of strict. It catches about 90% of my typos. As you say, plan for failure, not for success. I hope to catch all of my typos. I work at it. But I am not going to plan on success, and I am not going to throw away any tool that helps me achieve this success.

For this reason and this reason alone, strict is utterly invaluable to me. I don't know about others but I don't expect it to catch syntax errors. Logic errors are out of its purview. I wasn't planning on using symbolic references anyways, it is kind of nice to have it catch accidents where I pass the wrong thing to a function that expects to get a reference though. In short, it doesn't solve any deep problems.

But it still catches a lot of typos for me...