Agreed, but on the other hand it also saves a lot of complexity and possible headaches down the line. It's kind of a matter of choosing which headache you want. Especially if your table gets larger all those extra bytes in text columns can cost you dozens of GB of disk space, makes indexing slower, etc.

I MySQL/MariaDB enums are just "aliases" for ints, and that works much nicer IMHO, and adding a new value is cheap because it doesn't recheck all the rows (removing values is still expensive, as it needs to check it's not actually used by any row).