There's a difference between "1" and 1. When you import a csv and try to do maths on a "number" you won't get the expected result. Some importers won't even allow you to specify that "number" columns are numbers, they'll outright fail and force you to say it's a string, or you'll have to specify which columns are "numbers" and map the strings to numbers on the importer side.

If they are numbers to begin with (not "numbers"), you can just import the csv and you'll get the expected result out of the box.

In the end things are just 1s and 0s, but that doesn't mean we only ever do binary operations on data at the abstraction layer we humans operate, so saying it's just 0s and 1s or just strings is not very smart.

But now all our strings might be numbers! We now have to parse every quoted string, and we can no longer represent numbers as text.

    unquoted input:
    0, 10, "Text", "123"

    unambiguous output:
    (Num) 0, (Num) 10, (Text) Text, (Text) 123

    quoted input:
    "0", "10", "Text", "123"

    output :
    (Num) 0, (Num) 10, (Text) Text, (Num) 123