Perhaps saying they don't care is a bit much, they usually just don't need to care. The data is delivered to most websites in the form of JSON which can be parsed to any data format you want, and at that point it might even be faster to do a string compare to skip the double/int conversion.
I got what you were saying. That certainly may be case, depending on application. It looks in this case like its just definition files being loaded into memory, and if they need to compare that version more than once, doing it as a single operation binary comparison will be significantly faster than continually comparing a UTF-8 string (SIMD aside)
