Every primitive type has a null value, and the "if" statement tests for such a value. Whether a value is true or false is a property of the value. Notice that "true" and "false" are adjectives, not nouns.
That is a simple, internally consistent model with one concept of trueness.
The introduction of the boolean type made this a lot messier: it makes "if" look like type coercion, and introduces two different ways to think of boolean-ness (as an adjective or as a noun) which you must hold in your head at the same time. For example, it became possible to compare things as equal to True or False, doubling the number of ways to express a condition: "if x" and "if x == True" are now very similar, but subtly different, ways to express the same thing. The fact that we have to talk about things as "truthy" or "falsy" as if these were different from "true" and "false" is a further illustration of the mess this has created.
If we had stuck with 0 and 1, we would have avoided all this confusion. It is imperfect but simple; what we ended up with is still imperfect and needlessly complicated.
The addition of boolean `True` and `False` were a huge improvement to the language when they were finally added in 2.3.
I'm not sure why you're making things more complicated than they need to be. Test for truthiness. Conditional statements already evaluate boolean expressions, you're not adding anything explicit by writing `== True`.
I am not sure if that perspective aligns with yours.
In an explicitly, statically typed language, bools might be useful as a standard small enum.
In what Python used to be, they weren't, not really.
But for whatever reason, declared typing is now an add-on to the language, and the people who like the verbosity of declared typing also, perhaps schizophrenically, like the terseness afforded by having a standard small enum.