> an era where shaving bytes on storage was important

Fixed size strings don’t save bytes on storage tho, when the bank reserves 20 bytes for first name and you’re called Jon that’s 17 bytes doing fuckall.

What they do is make the entire record fixed size and give every field a fixed relative position so it’s very easy to access items, move record around, reuse allocations (or use static allocation), … cycles is what they save.