Currently, our code is quite disorganized with how it is handling typing. A quick search of the term "pyarrow" or "decimal" shows that we're explicitly typing certain fields in miscellaneous places. In a few more places and even in our test cases, we have to typecast to fix equality checks.

Because of how disorganized things are, this has led to:

1. Debugging typing-related problems leads to even more messiness.
2. Confusion over the typing of fields, which leads to immense frustration when writing test cases

We should re-consider how we're handling typing to reduce future programming burden.

@larsks @naved001 @knikolla Happy to hear your thoughts.