surrogateescape is something else altogether. It’s a hack to allow non-Unicode file names/environment variables/command line arguments in an otherwise-Unicode environment, by smuggling them through a part of the surrogate range (0x80 to 0xFF → U+DC80 to U+DCFF) which otherwise can’t occur (since it’s invalid Unicode). It’s a cunning hack that makes a lot of sense: they used a design error in one place (Python string representation) to cancel out a design error in another place (POSIX being late to the game on Unicode)!

It's not taking advantage of the weird way python strings work. You can put that hack on top of any string format that converts back and forth with unicode.