Compilers are there to make things more efficient for the machine running the code. Obfuscating a string is the opposite of that. What they actually do much of

Compilers are there to make things more efficient for the machine running the code. Obfuscating a string is the opposite of that. What they actually do much of the time is collect all the string literals into a contiguous pool so that their addresses are fixed and well-packed, providing efficiency at runtime. It's actually very easy to find string literals in executables because of this, not hard.