[txutxu]

For me, the code I did give, is not a workaround.

It's the canonical way of do it.

Other ways, even if they are "expected to work by inexperienced occasional users"... are simply flawed a first eye view.

A workaround is to ditch shell script, as soon as you face a problem, and blame shell script, and turn to do it in a "more advanced language" that has the same or more caveats. That could be a workaround.

Delimiting file names with null bytes, in case they could be split by any of the $IFS values, is NOT a workaround, is pure logic.