What's funny, is this is exactly one of the reasons I happen to like JavaScript... at its' core, the type coercion and falsy boolean rules work really well (imo) for ETL type work, where you're dealing with potentially untrusted data. How many times have you had to import a CSV with a bad record/row? It seems to happen all the time, why, because people use and manually manipulate data in spreadsheets.

In the end, it's a big part of why I tend to reach for JS/TS first (Deno) for most scripts that are even a little complex to attempt in bash.