While I agree with you that this is one of the arguments the author puts forward, it does little to convince me.

I can support that line of thought if we want to talk, for instance, about why Rust doesn't provide a "proper" iteration over characters [1] in their standard library. But in this case the Null character is an artificial construct that does not naturally exist in any language on Earth.

I sincerely doubt someone will ever find a naturally-ocurring "John \0 Doe". What I don't doubt is that such a name occurrs in a badly-migrated database somewhere, but that's a different discussion.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.str.html#method.char...