A byte array is a representation of a string, for sure. But strings themselves are higher-level abstractions. It shouldn't be that easy to mix the two.

An equivalent situation would be if integers were byte arrays. So len(x) would give you 4, for example, and you could do x[0], x[1] etc - except you would almost never actually do that in practice, and occasionally you'd end up doing the wrong thing by mistake.

If any language actually worked that way, everyone would be up in arms about it. Unfortunately, the same passes for strings, because of how conditioned we are to treat them as byte sequences.

Calling it "char" in C was probably the second million dollar mistake in the history of PL design, right after null.