[DinaCoder98]

Well sure, people may colloquially refer to a lot of things as "strings"—hell, you could refer to all sequences as strings if you just wanted to argue with people—but the idea of trying to encapsulate this all in the standard library in a single implementation seems confusing semantically and of questionable value. It seems a lot easier to work with a reasonable interpretation of a string with its associated tradeoffs—which again is implied by most standard libraries.

That said, I personally would balk at willing adopting any runtime that didn't enable iterating over a sequence of unicode code points, whether they be stored as utf8 or some 16-bit form, from a string of bytes in 2024 unless I were guaranteed to avoid having to deal with text processing of free-form human input.