>> That line has lots of brackets.  Try M-: (setq bidi-inhibit-bpa t) RET.
>
> I'd rather find-file-literally, which does that and more.
>

The problem is that find-file-literally does too much.

>
> But "No!", you say, that's throwing the baby out the bathwater.
>

No, IMO the main problem is that doing that is not in any way a graceful 
degradation.

>
> The baby in question is usually misshapen demon spawn, i.e, minified 
> json or logfile.
>

Even in that case, it seems reasonable to believe that seeing "你好" is 
way better than seeing "\344\275\240\345\245\275".