There is a way to read pickles without running them, but it is Python-only and still requires one to know how pickles work. The module `pickletools` can be used

There is a way to read pickles without running them, but it is Python-only and still requires one to know how pickles work. The module `pickletools` can be used to disassemble pickles to bytecode, just like `dis` for normal Python objects. Honestly, though, I wouldn't say that this invalidates the point about unreadability, but just hammers in exactly how unreadable they really are.