> I understand why they wouldn’t, but STRICT should be the default.

No wait, what do you mean?

As I mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47619982 - your application layer should be validating the data on its way in and out. I mention the two reasons I use for DB fall back

Checking the datatype is not the same as validating. There is lots of data out there that is invalid, and yet still has the correct type. In fact, that is the common case.

I dare say you will be hard pressed to find a dataset of significant size that doesn't have at least one invalid entry somewhere. Increasingly strict type rules will not fix that.