not precisely. Rust has let mut and Kotlin has val; ie the member layout and the mutability are treated differently, since those languages have mutability rules.

this is a circular argument anyway. the language designers could have figured out a way to do type inference like, eg, Java, but, again, explicitly chose not to.

a lot of modern languages explicitly disagree, eg Kotlin and Rust

this has been “the plan” since 2005. when i was in high school trying to figure out what the heck “cloud computing” was, this is what they were talking about: anything requiring more compute than secure authentication and pixel drawing would be rendered in the cloud and delivered to dumb terminals. this is what netbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones have been a step towards if not an implementation of.