The shared Redis client decodes replies as UTF-8 text, but the avatar cache
holds raw image bytes and a b"none" miss marker: an image could not be read
back at all, and a miss came back as str and crashed on .partition(b"\n").
Only a sender's first request worked; after that, a 500. The cache now goes
through a binary-safe client, get_redis_bytes().
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
