You're right that you'll have exactly the same issues if you use Date with a string.
However, with a string date you can bypass the Date class completely in many use cases.
My experience with this is anecdotal, but I've ran into many bugs due to conversion between day-precision values and Date objects. One example was a date picker library that returned values at 00:00 in the local timezone instead of UTC, which were then not correctly converted to UTC-based values before being persisted.
Once again, these are all preventable issues - just use UTC everywhere. I've just seen issues like that happen enough that I prefer never converting between dates and timestamps if I can avoid it.
> My experience with this is anecdotal, but I've ran into many bugs due to conversion between day-precision values and Date objects. One example was a date picker library that returned values at 00:00 in the local timezone instead of UTC, which were then not correctly converted to UTC-based values before being persisted.
Oh man, that sounds ugly, and an invitation for disaster. Lots of off-by-ones.
In my project's case, I also need to do math with them for analytical purposes. It's a game collection manager, so it's tracking the day you bought, beat, and 100%d a game.
I derive how long it took to beat a game by subtracting the UNIX timestamp of the purchase date from the beaten date's timestamp, then divide by (60*60*24) to measure days. It's handy to show games in the backlog and sort by purchase date, too, so you can target the games that've been sitting the longest. There are plans to graph out a collection in terms of its path from new to beaten to completed in a Gantt-style chart or something else fun.
But yeah, I just thought to ask because in JSON I and others can read `2023-12-01`, but not `1701417600`. SQLite and Python can do conversions for the calculations, and Python even has the timedelta module that might make my comparisons easier to do or slightly more accurate.
However, with a string date you can bypass the Date class completely in many use cases.
My experience with this is anecdotal, but I've ran into many bugs due to conversion between day-precision values and Date objects. One example was a date picker library that returned values at 00:00 in the local timezone instead of UTC, which were then not correctly converted to UTC-based values before being persisted.
Once again, these are all preventable issues - just use UTC everywhere. I've just seen issues like that happen enough that I prefer never converting between dates and timestamps if I can avoid it.