This article is kind of hard to evaluate, because the OP doesn't provide an example program with an example input that fails. So it's hard to judge whether the solution presented here is actually ideal. Instead, we're forced to just take the OP's word for it, which is kind of uncomfortable.
I do somewhat agree with the general sentiment, although I find it difficult to distinguish between the problems specifically related to its handling of Unicode and the fact that the language is unityped, which makes a lot of really subtle things very implicit.
The OP links to StackOverflow, where failing inputs are mentioned in the comments on the accepted answer. And the second-most upvoted answer explains that .decode('unicode_escape') only works for Latin-1 encoded text: https://stackoverflow.com/a/24519338
I do somewhat agree with the general sentiment, although I find it difficult to distinguish between the problems specifically related to its handling of Unicode and the fact that the language is unityped, which makes a lot of really subtle things very implicit.