Seems like existence of a method in the stdlib (or at least in the pathlib part of the stdlib) suggests issues with text encoding can be overcome. 

IMHO I would suggest most people have no idea about that method (I've been doing python for years and this has always been a personal frustration, and I've asked several others for better options and no one had one to offer),  and it seems like it would make much more sense as a string method. If someone has a string they want to save to disk, I can't imagine anyone looking in the Path library. 

I respect the desire to avoid bloat -- the context manager or open/close idiom has just felt unnecessarily complicated (dare I say unpythonic?) for a common task. 

Also, I think it's one that data scientists use a lot when they generate outputs to pull into LaTeX documents.