I would argue that it helps me when performing maintenance to see and correct where types may have changed. Not always, and sometimes it is busy work I agree, but overall I prefer it.
Yeah I generally avoid using 'var' to elide method return types for that reason. In my early phase of var enthusiasm I even had it result in a bug that would have been caught if the type had been made explicit.
I do still really like it in the `var list = new ArrayList<String>()` case though.
