> Python doesn't work well with file names in principle: it wants everything to be Unicode. That works for many, but if you want reliable code... you just have to throw all of that away.

Windows' APIs use UTF-16 and most file name encodings on Linux are UTF-8. How should Python handle this better?

> Also, in case of pathlib, it adds no value on top of os.path of which it is a wrapper.

Completely disagree. os.path is annoying to use. Treating paths as objects with methods and joining them with / makes my life much easier.

> increasing the size and memory footprint of "standard" library

By a ridiculous amount. pathlib is just another pure Python module with a bunch of simple functions and classes. [1]

> complicating dispatch and therefore debugging

You can simply declare and accept `Union[str, os.PathLike]` and convert the paths to whatever you want at the entrypoints, then use that in your own project. Where is the complexity? I've never seen this make debugging harder, it's just an additional type.

[1] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/d9fc15222e96942e30ea8...