So, will we be able to have strings like "\x41bc" be interpreted as
"abc" or will it become an error?

Forcing it to be "\x41 bc" will become unbearably tedious and confusing
to readers also used to programming in other languages.

It will become a large source of errors for string literals
transliterated from other other language environments.

If the compiler can detect it as an error, it can fix it, at least with
the \u and \x escapes. Other languages don't require a delimiter, they
either expect a varying sequence of digits or a fixed number. This is
more user friendly and trivial to implement.

Cheers,
Ray Blaak