From this observation alone you cannot tell that there is a trend towards static languages. You’d need to know where these people came from. If they mostly migrated from Java (or some other old, unergonomic statically typed langauge) then it is more of a sign that statically typed language are improving usability.
In my head good type inference brings statically and dynamically typed language very close together. The only remaining question is then: Is inferrability of the whole program mandatory or optional? And I personally will always opt for optional aka dynamical languages because it makes solving a problem the first time much much faster. After I solved a problem once, I can use that knowledge to come back and also make it type stable/inferrable/fast and what not. This option is just missing for statically typed languages.
What remains is the need for good tooling around types/inferrability on the dynamic language side and Julia can definitely improve here and already has tremendously. One thing I loved in Common Lisp where the “Compiler Notes” where you could get the compiler to tell you what it didn’t understand/couldn’t infer and what type annotations you could give it (latter part will be almost impossible in Julia I think, CL’s type system is much much simpler). So just having a global switch and macros for local use to warn you when something isn’t quite right would be great. Optionally, you could treat the warning as error and then you essentially have a statically typed language.