Can someone explain this to me?

So you have a text box and that text box width is 5 inches. There's a transformation panel that tells me that the width is 5 inches, the height is 2 inches and the x/y coordinates are whatever they are.

So in that transformation panel I change that width to 10 inches instead of 5 inches.

Can someone please explain to me the logic behind why Adobe thinks I'd want to deform my text and stretch it out instead of making the text box wider? Surely the use case scenario is much greater that I'd want change the text box dimensions rather than distort my text to some hideous looking mess? WTF?

Coming back to Illustrator to do work after having been in Sketch for so long now is paaaaaainful. So many small things that should be easy just aren't it seems. But enough of that, I digress.

Is there a way to accurately set the width of a text box numerically?

Thanks.