People struggle so much with this, but I don't see what the point is at all. The fundamental problem that playing with delimiters solves, is passing arbitrary strings through as single tokens.

Well, that's easy. Don't escape or quote the strings; encode them. Turn them into opaque tokens, and then do Unix things to the opaque tokens, before finally decoding them back to being strings.

There's a reason od(1) is in coreutils. It's a Unix fundamental when working with arbitrary data. Hex and base64 are your friends (and Unix tools are happy to deal with both.)