JSON_VALUE() behavior when RETURNING bytea (expected base64 decoding)

Greetings hackers,

The de-facto standard for storing binary data in JSON documents seems to be
base64-encoded strings, so I was expecting JSON_VALUE's RETURNING bytea to
do base64 decoding. However, that does not seem to be the case:

SELECT decode('AQID', 'base64'); -- 0x010203
SELECT JSON_VALUE(jsonb '"AQID"', '$' RETURNING bytea); -- Expected
0x010203, got AQID

This forces an additional explicit decode() function call:

SELECT decode(JSON_VALUE(jsonb '"AQID"', '$'), 'base64'); -- 0x010203

Is the above behavior intentional?

Shay