We've dropped python2, so things might be a little easier?
Updates:
Removed the worst offenders, and we will remove more eventually, but there are over 1000 occurrences and in many cases we just don't care about performance or possible encodings, we just want a 'string' (or 'bytes').
this ticket has been moved to: https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/2552