I just tried to change both the Janno column types for PoseidonID and for GroupNames to ByteString.Char8 within the new VCF-writing PR, but got weird compiler errors around makeInstances. I don't know template Haskell, so can't continue on this. I will for now leave these types as String and Text, respectively, and would need some help to get this done.
On the sequence-formats side, we now use exclusively ByteString.Char8 for these ASCII-restricted fields.