[baq]

when I'm reading text on a screen, I very much am not reading bytes. this is obvious when you actually think what 'text encoding' means.

[account42]

You're not reading unicode code points either though. Your computer uses bytes, you read glyphs which roughly correspond to unicode extended grapheme clusters - anything between might look like the correct solution at first but is the wrong abstraction for almost everything.

[baq]

you are right, but this just drives the point.