The thing is, I made it a conscious effort not to have any breaking changes on the API. What you are referring to here isn't a breaking change in OctoPrint, it's a breaking change in Python 3 that affects a helper class provided by OctoPrint as that inherits from a core Python class. I'll make a mention of it in the bytes vs string section though to give it some more visibility. It's also the only thing that I'm aware of at present.
edit Added:
I sincerely hope that that's not how most plugin developers start given that the tutorial explicitly walks people through setting up a proper local development environment. Developing directly on a Pi is just painful.
I also make it a point to start OctoPrint manually from shell in the migration guide, in the corresponding venv, via the octoprint
executable. I'd rather not want to confuse people and start with OctoPi details there, especially not since the guide isn't about how to migrate your OctoPi image to using Python 3, but rather how to migrate your OctoPrint plugins to Python 3... I'll think about adding a footnote though.
edit Added, and not as a footnote: