Question

At a very abstract level I do know that wrapper classes, create an object of the primitive data type but I was curious as to why do we need to use wrapper classes and what benefits do they offer over primitive data types.

Answer 1

Collections in the first place, for example,List<Integer>, you cannot use primitive int here.
Actually any generic class / interface that can work with different object types like

public interface Callable<V> {
    V call() throws Exception;
}

Note that wrapping is best done using not new Integer(i) but Integer.valueOf(i) the latter will try to use cache. Unwrapping is done as Integer.intValue(). These wrapping / unwrapping of primitives are so typical operations that Java 5 introduced autoboxing / unboxing

List<Integer> list = new ArrayList<>();
list.add(1);
int i = list.get(0);

this code is automatically converted by Java compiler into

list.add(Integer.valueIf(1));
int i = list.get(0).intValue();    // this is where NullPointerException sometimes happens