I don't really think it's better - certainly it was not better until many years after release when they started admitting their big mistakes.

But even today, codepoint indexing is too easy and doesn't crash so lots of code is still subtly wrong. Memory usage of a string grows 3x if you add a single emoji. Most libraries are still agnostic about whether they take bytes or str so you still get exceptions thrown with no easy solution. (The growing popularity of type hints is fixing this, but that's not really related to Python 3.)