If we do it that way, we have worse problems.

    if "False":  
       # What do you expect?  True or False?  
       print("True")
    else:
       print("False")

bool() is consistent with how "truthiness" happens in python. Otherwise we end up with the YAML norway problem.

    if bool("False"):
       print("True")
    else:
       print("False")  # This would be different if we landed here.

And that would be different behavior then the above -- creating a nasty inconsistency.

Honestly it's not that hard to write something that looks like this:

    def str_to_bool(val: str) -> bool:
        return val.lower() in ["yes", "true", "1"]