Pretending that strings and sequences of bytes are identical and interchangeable is fundamentally flawed. The only reason people were able to get away with it f

Pretending that strings and sequences of bytes are identical and interchangeable is fundamentally flawed. The only reason people were able to get away with it for as long as they did was because of immense pain inflicted on the rest of the Python programming community. If you require an eternally frozen implementation of Python 2's behavior in order to get your work done, you can download the source and keep it around as long as you like. Nobody else has an obligation to support you or hold back the rest of the world in order to suit your use case in your preferred way.