Seems useful to me in the context of something like a progressively rendered UI. A large block of text appearing a few characters at a time would be fine, but a number that represents something like a display metric (say, a position, or font-size) going from 0 to 0.5 or from 1 to 1000, would result in goofy gyrations on-screen that don't make any sense. Or imagine if it was just fields in the app's data.

Name: John Smith. Birth Year: A.D. 1 [Customer is a Senior: 2,024 years old]

Name: John Smith. Birth year: A.D. 19 [Customer is a Senior: 2,006 years old]

Name: John Smith. Birth year: A.D. 199 [Customer is a Senior: 1,826 years old]

Name: John Smith. Birth year: 1997