I'm a little nervous about using view with a different dtype itemsize. See this warning from the docs:

For a.view(some_dtype), if some_dtype has a different number of bytes per entry than the previous dtype (for example, converting a regular array to a structured array), then the behavior of the view cannot be predicted just from the superficial appearance of a (shown by print(a)). It also depends on exactly how a is stored in memory. Therefore if a is C-ordered versus fortran-ordered, versus defined as a slice or transpose, etc., the view may give different results.

It might be just fine for merely getting access to the data buffer, though.

Yeah, I think that these would all be tricky situations if the itemsizes were relatively prime or if you actually cared about indexing afterwards. I think we're safe turning it into a view of singleton bytes though.