No, it was not great during 1.x times. But it has been fairly good since 2.0
So for at least 12 years then. 2.0 was released in 2013.
Only if you count 1.9.2 as the beginning. What is being talked about is Unicode by default and maybe Unicode tooling (i.e. can correctly iterate over emojis and not just bytes)
right it was the python string transition i was talking about