Python 2 encourages the unaware to silently write broken, anglocentric code. Python 3 puts the problem in your face.

I don't see how that is responsive to the question about using bytes/Py2 string for path names.

Python 2 encourages the unaware to silently write broken, anglocentric code [which interacts with paths].

Python 3 encourages the unaware to write broken code in a utf8-centric way instead. The unaware are going to write broken code.

Not true. Compare these:

https://docs.python.org/2/library/os.html#os.listdir

https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/os.html#os.listdir

What specific difference are you trying to highlight? The only distinction I see is that Python 3.3 adds support for file descriptors.

Likely the existence and explicit mention of os.fsencode, as well as the api giving what you put in, so accepting bytes if you do things safely.

The 2 API also returns the same type you put in.

os.fsencode() was changed in Python 3 longer after the 3.0 fork and isn't inherent to 3 -- the same change could be made to Python 2. It only wasn't because Python.org has been intentionally neglecting Python 2 since 2015.

(The Python 2 equivalent of os.fsencode() is just encoding with sys.getfilesystemencoding(). The primary difference is that fsencode() uses the surrogateescape error handler by default. Since this is a relaxed behavior, it seems like it could be added to Python 2 without regressing existing programs.)

Yes, so the documentation and language explicitly have tools to avoid encoding issues and make you aware of them. It encourages writing good, unbroken, code.