will be updating this a lot whenever I want to use typing but with typing that's not present in typing library. mypy + pylance ready!

better_typing.py

from __future__ import annotations

from typing import Any, TypeVar, overload

T = TypeVar("T")


@overload
def cast(typ: type[T], val: Any, /) -> T: ...
@overload
def cast(typ: str, val: Any, /) -> Any: ...
@overload
def cast(typ: object, val: Any, /) -> Any: ...
def cast(typ: Any, val: Any, /) -> Any:  # fmt: off
    """Cast a value to a type.

    This returns the value unchanged. To the type checker this
    signals that the return value has the designated type, but at
    runtime we intentionally don't check anything (we want this
    to be as fast as possible).
    """
    return val