Hindsight is 20/20 but that article definitely makes me question the technical leadership of the project. They chose to write a source transformer (which introduced its own set of issues) rather than update string literals to use b'' syntax because they didn't want contributors to have to learn how to use python 3? And because they didn't want lines to be too long? And because it would break change attribution for the lines in question? None of those reasons sound compelling to me at all, but the author presents them as the correct decision.