What about the identity side of it? Does the JS specification say that an operation like "a" + "b" is not required to create a new object? Regardless of whether there is such a spec, you can write code that is sensitive to the difference.
The spec indeed goes through some trouble to ensure they are pure value-types and do not exhibit any reference-like semantics, for instance by prohibiting their use as keys of WeakMaps and WeakSets - along with numbers, booleans, nullish values, and bignums.