> The question you should be asking is: why does it ever make sense to silently compare a character string to anything other than a character string?
Because this is how C does it.
Certainly "this is how C does it" might be the worst possible rationale for anything in this space. And I like C, got paid a whole lot of money to write C over many years.
But hilariously it's not even true, you see C believes the empty string is also true, it's a string, only the absence of a string would be false in C - whereas Javascript is quite sure the empty string, just like an undefined or null value, is false.
You know what you do when you can't handle an exceptional case? You throw an exception! Emitting errors is not undesirable behavior! It just means the computer says, "I don't know what to do so I better stop." You're never going to design all possible exceptions away, and that's not a flaw.
The question you should be asking is: why does it ever make sense to silently compare a character string to anything other than a character string? Semanticly, it's nonsense to compare different types. The only way you can do it is when the other type has a canonical string representation, neverminding issues of culture or language.
This is why, for example, C# has String.IsNullOrWhitespace() and String.IsNullOrEmpty(). It's partly to cover common combinations, but also to idiomatically determine if a meaningful value is present, which is what `StringVal == True` and `if (StringVal)` are trying to express and failing at.