> even though I cannot recall running into a problem that would have prevented by its presence in the before-time

I very, very much did. I was using a Python package that used a lot of NumPy internally, and sometimes its return values would be Python integers, and sometimes they'd be NumPy integers.

The Python integers would get written to SQLite as SQLite integers. The NumPy integers would get written to SQLite as SQLite binary blobs. Preventing you from doing simple things like even comparing for equal values.

Setting to STRICT caused an error whenever my code tried to insert a binary blob into an integer column, so I knew where in the code I needed to explicitly convert the values to Python integers when necessary.