It's 2025 and the Python world has now embraced type hinting. I won't lay out the case for this practice in general, because plenty has been written about it.

For WP1, the most immediate benefits I see are:

1. Knowing when you're working with b'bytes' from the DB (as opposed to a 'string', because the DB stores only bytes for legacy reasons
2. Knowing when you're dealing with a UUID versus a "regular" string.