In other words, serialising an int into bytes is an operation that fundamentally requires you to care about endianness, if you want your files and/or implementa

In other words, serialising an int into bytes is an operation that fundamentally requires you to care about endianness, if you want your files and/or implementation to be platform-interchangeable. A format that tricks you into thinking you don't need to think about it is a suboptimal one, in my opinion.