The "catting binary files" problem largely goes away when you use a terminal emulator that doesn't implement ISO 2022 escape sequences, or where ISO 2022 support can be and has been turned off. The mosh people made a big deal about this approximately five years ago.

Their claim that only mosh is like this, still present on their WWW site, is not in fact true now.

I say "largely" because there are a couple of other nasty escape sequences, like (for example) OSC sequences to set window titles and terminal names, that binary files can also accidentally contain and that therefore have to be disabled. Removing ISO 2022 makes the problem far less likely to be hit, but doesn't quite eliminate it entirely.