Everything gets serialized to a string of bytes. The point is that you can fail at parsing when the value doesn't make sense, rather than failing at some point in the future when you decide to use the value and it doesn't make sense. And if you have a defined schema, you can have your editor validate it against the schema when saving, so you don't accidentally have "FILENOTFOUND" in a Boolean.
Everything gets serialized to a string of bytes. The point is that you can fail at parsing when the value doesn't make sense, rather than failing at some point in the future when you decide to use the value and it doesn't make sense. And if you have a defined schema, you can have your editor validate it against the schema when saving, so you don't accidentally have "FILENOTFOUND" in a Boolean.