Strings can contain bytes. You don't have to do anything special to work with bytes. use bytes; has nothing to do with manipulating bytes.

If you need to manipulate the internal string format to optimize or to work with some buggy XS,
You want utf8::upgrade or utf8::downgrade.
If you need you need to encode to UTF-8 or decode from UTF-8,
You want utf8::encode, Encode::encode, utf8::decode or Encode::decode.

The person probably wants to eliminate it because of that very misconception you expressed. But don't worry, if anything is ever done, it would still be available on CPAN.

In reply to Re^4: Alternative to bytes::length() by ikegami
in thread Alternative to bytes::length() by creamygoodness

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