Hi Jason,
First off, let’s tag @isaiah so he can pipe in with a definitive answer.
Secondly, You’ll probably have a better chance of getting this kind of technical stack development questions answered over on the Yourhead slack channel. If you are going to do stack development your going to want to join there anyway.
Information on joining can be found on this post.
Finally, my take on the question, I think since the field is numeric, it will return a number. There are other internal things like template variables (like Integer Math, or Integer Comparison) and the math control that wouldn’t work without a numeric value.