Stating that "this is a feature not a bug" does not make it so.
This breaks existing code and reduces the capabilities of the `ast` module.
For example, how does one get the location of the docstring now?

From a syntactic point of view.
def foo():
   "help"
and
def foo():
   b'"help"
barely differ.
The S in AST stands for Syntax not Semantics.