This is necessary in JS because the language itself is broken. You actually can't JUST add 2 "number"s because they might not actually be numbers. Writing raw JS is like writing raw assembly.
Forgive me for having chosen pseudo js for the example - and npm. That conflates the issue. I meant to convey an attitude - let some random package do the work, who cares whether it is deep and complex and handling cases I won't ever need, offering API surface that will go unused, and perhaps doing simple things inefficiently. The language doesn't much matter if "ship ship ship rn" is the ethic that drives decision making.