First, if we're talking about practicality, and not just theoretical considerations, then the numbers should not be stored as Peano integers a.k.a. base 1 in the first place. Use lists of 8-tuples of bools or native machine integers or whatever, otherwise, you will suffer from O(n) complexities somewhere in your arithmetic, that's just how base 1 works. Fretting over which particular basic operation has to house this linear-over-logarithmic overhead is IMO unproductive: use better data structures instead of counting sticks.

Second, if we're talking about other data structures, especially recursive ones, e.g. lists, then having easily available (and performant) structural recursion is just more useful than having right folds out of the box: those can be recreated easily, but going in the other direction is much more convoluted.