> but it means that your code handling things-that-might-be-strings-or-bytes often needs to have a different structure than the rest of your code.
Isn't that the point? String and bytes are different beasties. You can often encode strings to bytes and just about anything accepting bytes will accept it, but the converse is not true. Bytes are more permissive in that any sequence of any 0x00-0xff is acceptable, but str implies utf8 (not always guaranteed, I've seen some shit), meaning e.g. you can dump it to json without any escaping/base encoding.
Isn't that the point? String and bytes are different beasties. You can often encode strings to bytes and just about anything accepting bytes will accept it, but the converse is not true. Bytes are more permissive in that any sequence of any 0x00-0xff is acceptable, but str implies utf8 (not always guaranteed, I've seen some shit), meaning e.g. you can dump it to json without any escaping/base encoding.