That’s how javascript treats single item arrays with strings.
Here’s a very simple example showing this, you can test yourself:
<script>
var imageUrl = ['img1.jpg'];
var imgElement = document.createElement('img');
imgElement.src = '/assets/img/'+imageUrl;
document.body.appendChild(imgElement);
</script>
Also if you do a comparison:
['img1.jpg'] == 'img1.jpg'
returns true.