I think it's bad to attempt to redefine an established term in this way, but anyway people who use that established definition are not merely fools who lack your wisdom; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46086919.
Anyway, coming from a C background, sure, strings are kind of just sequences of bytes. For people coming from other backgrounds, they'll have different understandings of what a string is (probably more based on semantics of the language they learnt first than on the underlying representation in memory). I'm not trying to persuade you of one definition or another. Nor am I redefining the meaning of a string, as it's clearly subjective by background and/or by context.
To that end, take my point as merely "you need to know the context", and I happen to believe the context that matters is the semantics of the programming language you're using (as opposed to the underlying representation of an instance of the type in memory).
My comments are also for the benefit of the many folks (particularly junior members of our community) that perhaps don't have exposure to this way of looking at things.
