Digging deeper, this particular microcontroller was tuned for accessing 32 bits at a time. Accessing individual bytes needed extra bit-shuffling code to be added by the compiler.
Raymond's blog on the Alpha https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170816-00/?p=96...
But -- they are different. Architectures where they're treated the same are probably the exception. Depending on what you mean by "very different" - most architectures will emit different code for byte access versus word access.
Accessing an 8 bit byte from a pointer, the compiler would insert assembly code into the generated object code. The "normal" part of the pointer would be read, loading four characters into a 32 bit register. Two extra bits were squirreled away somewhere in the pointer and these would feed into a shift instruction so the requested byte would appear in the lowest-significant 8 bits of the register. Finally, an AND instruction would clear the top 24 bits.