This in a template file:
<script type="text/x-magento-init">
{
"*": {
"component": {
"my_config" : "<?php echo 0; ?>"
}
}
}
</script>
will be transformed to a string in the component javascript file. This is really annoying because 0 is not a falsey value in js, so:
if(config.my_config){ ... }
will not work. This is just an example, there are others where you want to make sure you return integers and you lose time trying to debug what's happening.