Arduino IDE Serial Monitor - how to send NUMBERs - not charcters of numbers
I think the comments on your question are quite clear. The important point: any asynchronuous protocoll must include the info either how many bytes are transmitted or which byte is the last one. In "raw data", where each value (0-255) can be a legit data value, there is no way to use bytes for meta data. That's why typically only encoded data is transmitted: you have a small range of byte values that can contain the actual info (alphabet and digits) and you have a bunch of values that are free to be used as meta data. E.g. the commonly used \n as endbyte has the int value 10. How would you transmit the int value 10 in that case?

"I don't want to implement some silly translation from character value to int" - it's not silly, that's the way to go! What about float, boolean or negative values (8-bit, 16-bit, etc.)? You may even want to transmit structured data like python dictionaries. The only way the achieve this is using some kind of parser which knows the protocol.