BUG: Never end up with numpy string dtypes

[phofl]

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Code Sample, a copy-pastable example

DataFrame(["foo", "bar", "baz"]).astype(bytes)

As discussed in #39484 we do not want to get numpy string dtypes here. This should have dtype object

[jreback]

this is a breaking change, but was never intended and we have 0 support for S (or B) types as native pandas types.

[jorisvandenbossche]

Can we deprecate this in some way first?

And what do you exactly want to change? Only the resulting dtype to be object (but still do the conversion to bytes), or actually disallow casting to bytest altogether?

[jorisvandenbossche]

One option would be to deprecate astype(bytes) or astype(np.dtype("S")), and let users use another method to actually convert values to bytes (eg s.map(bytes) might also do that?)

[simonjayhawkins]

removing the milestone