How is Javascript better at string manipulation? I've never encountered anything special there that I can't do in just about every other language. Javascript just has more helper functions out of the box.
Plaid's use case here is automating logins, responding to captchas, manipulating those on-screen virtual keypads to respond to security questions, chaining together multiple HTTP requests, and then parsing out frequently invalid, rapidly changing, and just plain broken content from a wide multitude of banking websites.
And things like data types should be strictly enforced, otherwise you can get unpredictable results, which is especially bad when you're dealing with money transfers.
You would have a really difficult life in web scraping. You do not have the guarantees of well-formed data. Instead you get HTML with mismatched tags, JSON with newlines in the middle of strings, content that claims it's UTF-8 but upon closer inspection is actually GB2312, pagination endpoints with off-by-one errors, etc. It's an absolute mess and taking the stance of "well, they didn't encode their JSON correctly, so we're not going to operate on their data" isn't a very effective strategy.
> Which is especially bad when you're dealing with money transfers
Afaik Plaid is read-only. They fetch information from financial institutions and make it available through an API.
That's why I'm so uncomfortable handling things like bank transfers over such inconsistent, buggy systems, which is what Plaid does. It's not read-only: https://plaid.com/use-cases/consumer-payments/
Not to say I don't trust Plaid, I'm sure they're aware of all this and very careful about how they do things.
I have no affiliation with plaid, I've honestly only heard negative things about those guys, I was only empathizing with the difficulties in maintaining thousands of different scrapers and why I felt a scripting language provided far more latitude to get things done.