Not necessarily, but being able to specify types beyond those allowed by STRICT tables is useful.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to specify the stored type (or at least, side step numeric affinity), and give the type a name (for introspection, documentation).

Specifying that a column is a DATETIME, a JSON, or a DECIMAL is useful, IMO.

Alas, neither STRICT nor non-STRICT tables allow this.