Example problematic variable: CHARACTER WORDARR(3)*8
This would be wrapped by an array with shape (3, 8) and dtype |S1,
instead of the desired shape (3,) and dtype |S8.
See #23356.

in previous version, any string scalar was converted to a string array of dimension len, i.e., a definition

character(len=N) :: X
effectively became

character(len=NNN), dimension(NNN) :: X
from the point of few of the numpy (python) interface:

X.shape == (NNN,)
X.dtype == '|SNNN'

Closes gh-23192