That's called "dealing with the reality of international text instead of burying your head in the sand," isn't it? Bytes are not text any more than bytes are a picture or bytes are a sound recording; it is only in the context of an encoding that bytes can be interpreted as something more.
For that matter, given the inexplicable popularity of emojis, it isn't even a matter of international text anymore.
"dealing with raw bytes" = processing raw binary data (firmware dump, binary network protocols etc), not complete works of Shakespeare translated to 10 languages.
For that matter, given the inexplicable popularity of emojis, it isn't even a matter of international text anymore.