Airtable is strongly typed in the fields of the tables, but the expression language is not. It is my conclusion based on researching Airtable, that the decision to have well typed tables is so that relational operations work nicely, and so that they can implement interfaces on top of these tables easily, such as calendars and work planning things etc. I don’t think that there is an underlying motivation to fix the ill-type code of the world, so to speak. Any non-trivial code work is done in JavaScript, anyway.