The developer's intention is that anything can go in there.

You would only inherit a project where everything was ANY if anything could go anywhere.

With SQLite's default behavior, anything can always go anywhere, so the type definitions are at best semi-accidentally observed by the code, and at worst completely misleading. You have no idea which of the two the developer intended.

I get the impression that this SQLite behavior is a historical oddity caused by the original use case for the tool, rather than something that was intentionally planned and thought through, and was later retconned to be intentional and benign. To me, it makes no sense, even after reading the explanation on sqlite's website.

The intent of ANY is obviously that the values be flexible. That’s why it’s there if you need it.

“I intended this to be an integer but it could really be anything” is not very useful.