&gt; The str&#x2F;unicode fix was one of the driving factors for Python 3 to exist in the first place, and if you removed it, then what&#x27;s the point?<p>The reason python 3 exists is that most python 2 code had latent unicode-related bugs that would only manifest when they were exposed to non-ascii data. The backwards-incompatible barrier between str and bytes was the solution the python 3 team chose for this problem; adopting utf-8 as the standard encoding would have been another solution which I claim would have been more backwards-compatible (essentially moving to the go&#x2F;rust model, which prove that you don&#x27;t necessarily need separate byte and character string types for correct unicode handling).