Python 3 doesn't remove all unicode issues, it's not magic. But the pain is 95% gone compared with Python 2. I write Python for a living, and my life has been a lot better since we switched.

Because unicode is default and the byte-type is single-byte adressable (rather than 1 character in <encoding>) it makes it more straightforward. It's not perfect, but it helps a lot.

It doesn't? I've ran into UnicodeDecodeError exceptions literally every time I've had to deal with external input in Python 2. It was a nightmare, and it made me hate Python.

With Python 3, that simply has never happened to me. Never.

I don't know why. I don't know what the change, what the secret sauce was. And what's even better: I don't have to care. Python now simply works for me.

So yes, Python did remove Unicode issues.