It's not "mildly annoying".
I don't enable strict mode on multiple projects because people don't want to type anything outside of function signatures.
Inferring the type from the first use is 100% the correct choice because this is what users want 99% of the time, for the rest you can provide type information.
Annotating empty collections is one of the few places you need to annotate outside function signatures. It's not a big deal. It doesn't happen that often.