That's the Python 2 mentality and a large part of this discussion was that it didn't work in hindsight, that you can't just be "encoding oblivious", but it usually doesn't show up as an obvious problem until you least expect it. Our input and output devices are aren't always homozygous on byte encoding (and quite possibly very rarely are; we have decades and decades of kludges around this), and testing every program with Emoji has become one of my favorite pastimes for finding failure cases.