I didn't know that at some point, then I knew that and found it obvious, and now I don't know it again.
Strings are very very not sequences of bytes. Strings are a semantic thing. There may be a sequence of bytes in some representation of a particular string, but even then those bytes are not enough to define a string without other stuff. An encoding, at the very least. But even then, there are many things that could be described as a "string". A sequence of code points, perhaps? Or scalar values? Grapheme clusters?
Not to mention that you may not even have a linear sequence of bytes at the bottom level. You might have a rope (cons cell), or an intern pointer, or...
(Reposting because original comment was "flagged".)
This is a profoundly stupid kind of argument. There isn't even an objective truth you could conceivably convince someone of. There's just how you're choosing to use the word in conflict with a preexisting convention, which marks you as part of some social group, just like "this slaps", "skibidi", "rad", or "whenever". The preexisting convention isn't some apprehension of objective truth either. It's just an arbitrary tradition, like the meaning of any word.
People who are using the word in the older sense are usually not mistaken. At worst, they're your political enemies, but often they aren't even that; they just have experiences you don't. Attempting to persuade them, as you are doing, can only have the effect of further narrowing your intellectual horizons—even in the unlikely case that you are successful, but especially in the far more common case where they try to avoid you after that.
I recommend more curiosity and less crusading.
(In the rare case where someone is mistaken, it's sufficient to say "I meant a Unicode string" or "but we're iterating over codepoints, not bytes," but such mere clarification is not what you're up to.)
Strings are very very not sequences of bytes. Strings are a semantic thing. There may be a sequence of bytes in some representation of a particular string, but even then those bytes are not enough to define a string without other stuff. An encoding, at the very least. But even then, there are many things that could be described as a "string". A sequence of code points, perhaps? Or scalar values? Grapheme clusters?
Not to mention that you may not even have a linear sequence of bytes at the bottom level. You might have a rope (cons cell), or an intern pointer, or...