It's better to say that, in C, characters are bytes. That's why coming at this from the modern perspective of "characters are the things on my screen" is always

It's better to say that, in C, characters are bytes. That's why coming at this from the modern perspective of "characters are the things on my screen" is always going to confuse you - C doesn't have bytes, only characters. C programmers (should) understand this the same way Lisp programmers understand that "CAR" and "CDR" refer to "first" and "rest" or Forth programmers understand that "the stack" is the data stack and has no relation to the call stack.