dsj36

I think it was David Beazley who characterized metaclasses as "infecting" an inheritance tree. If `class A` has a metaclass, then all subclasses of `A` will inherit the metaclass as well. This behavior is not shared by class decorators, which only affect the decorated class.

So, I think this is a pretty reasonable place to use them -- getting magic behavior from class decorators / metaclasses is bad enough, but getting surprised when losing it upon subclassing is even worse!

how did the error JSON include the undecodable bytes? JSON strings are all unicode sequences, so there would have had to be some way that the raw bytes were mapped into codepoints.

on the other hand, if the offending bytes were blindly substituted into the JSON, then it's not surprising that there were decoding issues down the line...