The convenience of not having to marshal data over a network is certainly a use case. But I'll admit that two of the worst programs I ever saw were written in Perl and TCL. Somehow just a big jumble of inscrutable regexes.
When "everything is a string" then you have no choice but to literally treat everything as a string. Painful. Very cool project though.
That sounds more like someone who over-uses regexes - the developer is the problem, not the language
TCL has a lot of options for manipulating strings - take a look at just the built in string command for a start: https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl8.4/TclCmd/string.htm
I have seen terrible code in Python, C, and more.