I don't think this is about human readability (albeit it might be to some extent during the design phase). Instead, I think this was the sensible thing to do wh

I don't think this is about human readability (albeit it might be to some extent during the design phase). Instead, I think this was the sensible thing to do when byte order was way more variable across a network. If you only send single bytes to begin with, you can as well use a textual format, IMO.