> It makes absolutely no sense to have escaped unicode characters as actual unicode string.

Absolutely no sense? So is a basic Python expression evaluator like this complete nonsense to you? #!/usr/bin/env python3

  try:  # Python 2
   from Tkinter import Tk, Entry, END
   import tkMessageBox as messagebox
  except ImportError:  # Python 3
   from tkinter import Tk, Entry, END, messagebox

  import ast
  def my_eval(s):
   # assume I've implemented this functionality manually...
   return ast.literal_eval(s)

  root = Tk()
  e = Entry(root)
  e.insert(END, '"Hell\\xc3\\xb6"')  # Assume the user typed has typed in a Python expression, not me
  e.pack()
  root.bind('<Return>', lambda evt: messagebox.showinfo("Result", repr(my_eval(e.get()))))
  root.mainloop()

I get an escaped string... because that's quite literally what Entry.get() gives me from the text box the user typed into. The simple fact that I got a string containing Python source code with escape characters makes "absolutely no sense" to you?

Note that that wasn't even my choice! That was the choice of the built-in Python GUI toolkit... distributed by the same folks who decided this string/bytes overhaul was a brilliant idea...