The whole "cat can hide unprintable characters" is such an old demo. I get this is a novel spin on which unprintable characters were doing but yeah, this was also my thought

I'm just used to aliasing cat to strings after working around a lot of red-team penetration testers. They would prank each other and me all the time. Had to also watch out for this one [1].

[1] - https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste