What is the benefit of creating an Oracle context over just granting package execution?

I have been programming oracle row-level security using DBMS_RLS for several years, but I have actually skipped creating contexts. I have seen the intermittent recommendations to CREATE CONTEXT and now I'm trying to pull the trigger. But I'm not seeing much benefit to a context at *session level*. I attach a package, but I still have to grant execute on it to any users I want to be able to use it. What am I missing? As far as I can tell, the only thing that creating the context with the package is that the package can issue DBMS_SESSION.SET_CONTEXT naming that context. After that a call to SYS_CONTEXT with that context will get the value set. However, SYS_CONTEXT is itself kind of a hack. It only returns a VARCHAR2 rather than a typed value. Why not just add a function to the same package with the right data type? Anything I put into the context with the context package can also be available through that same package. Now, creating a *global* context seems like it might have benefits sharing across sessions, except that's not my goal here.