That hasn't been my experience. In Python 2 your program would appear to work fine initially, but the first time your data happens to contain a non-ASCII character you would get a mysterious UnicodeDecodeError somewhere far away from where the actual problem is.
In Python 3 it just works again, like it did in Python 1.5, before the whole str/unicode implicit-conversion mess was introduced in Python 2.
In Python 3 it just works again, like it did in Python 1.5, before the whole str/unicode implicit-conversion mess was introduced in Python 2.