In the docs regarding this setting it lists the default as zero. Furthermore, in the JSON page
For compatibility with JavaScript, Int64 and UInt64 integers are enclosed in double quotes by default. To remove the quotes, you can set the configuration parameter output_format_json_quote_64bit_integers to 0.
Currently I am running 25.4.3.22-alpine in my testing environment. I am ingesting the json as string into a JSON column and then casting to String using toJSONString(). To recreate you can simply run
SELECT toJSONString('{"a":0}'::json) as str and see that this outputs a quoted number
Running SELECT toJSONString('{"a":0}'::json) as str SETTINGS output_format_json_quote_64bit_integers='0' outputs an non quoted zero. This also is reproducible in ClickHouse playground. I am asking for the docs to better reflect the default here. Thank you!