Oddly, no, there's no specific function for taking a root-level scalar JSON term (like '"foo"'::jsonb), and extracting said scalar to its equivalent native Postgres type.
You can still do it (for extracting to text, at least), but you have to use a 'vacuous' path-navigation to accomplish it, so it's extremely clumsy, and wastes the potential of the new syntax:
SELECT '"foo"'::jsonb #>> (ARRAY[]::text[]);