Yeah I mean it's definitely possible to write a mostly sensible string-number equality function that only breaks in edge-cases, but at this point it's all kinda vibes-based mush, and the real question is like... Why would you want to do that? What are you really trying to achieve?

The most likely case is that it's a novice that doesn't understand what they're doing and the Python setup you describe does a better job at setting up guardrails.

I don't really see the connection to concatenation, that's kind of its own thing.