Digging thru javascript/JSONata documentation (and further testing)I think the issue is that JSONata is using JSON.Stringify to convert nearly all objects to strings.
i.e its not the concatenation that is the issue - its the basic conversion from data object to a string that is an issue
And this doesn't work cleanly if the object is a date (needs to use .toString() instead)
If people agree with my reasoning, I'll go looking for a JSONata forum and raise it on there