@Earthcomputer It’s true I did not research how this negatively impacts the gameplay, and frankly this wasn’t my goal.
I simply reported the obvious inconsistency that occurs when a signed primitive type is read as unsigned type.
It is clear to me however that this creates uncontrolled behavior.
Reading it as an unsigned type would only make sense if you desperately needed the extra positive bit to convey even larger numbers, in which case, it would still be better not to use byte at all for this.
Still not fixed/ betapre-10
Still in 1.16 Pre-release 8.