> It's just that people tend to use specialized tools for encoding and decoding it instead of like ",".join(row) and row.split(",")

You really super can't just split on commas for csv. You need to handle the string encodings since records can have commas occur in a string, and you need to handle quoting since you need to know when a string ends and that string may have internal quote characters. For either format unless you know your data super well you need to use a library.