I think this is mostly correct. Certainly when dealing with streams, it makes code more straightforward to just deal with a byte at a time. But grepping over so

I think this is mostly correct. Certainly when dealing with streams, it makes code more straightforward to just deal with a byte at a time. But grepping over some old code to see where I've used WORDS_BIGENDIAN, I see cases where I defined a typedef struct for a memory mapped binary data format. That is one place where you would sacrifice performance and clarity by dealing with bytes.