No. They're a set of compiler-enforced contracts between pieces of code. Maybe more importantly, they enable a kind of constant, aggressive refactoring that's just way too dangerous in dynamic code.
Maybe at large scale, I have spent my career working with 200k - 500k loc systems in java, c#, and ruby, and in my experience, the thing that makes refactoring possible or a nightmare is well written test suites, not compilers. Compilers definitely catch a certain class of problem, but tests catch many more.
It holds even more so at small scale because I can pretty confidently move a method up an inheritance chain or rename a class and count on the compiler catching everything. In a bigger codebase I have to be more careful about breaking somebody's excessively dynamic code that might be pointing to those things in a roundabout way.
As an experiment last year I started teaching myself machine learning by implementing the common algorithms in Clojure and Scala simultaneously. I expected Clojure to win out and worked a lot harder in the beginning but after a while I was forced to concede that my Scala code was cleaner, faster, and less buggy, partly because I felt comfortable changing things because I knew the compiler would help me.
