[MediaWiki-l] interpreting binary data in mediawikiuser table

I recently upgraded an older version of mediawiki to the recent version. The upgrade seems to have changed the data in the mediawikiuser database table from plaintext to a binary encoding. (My database is MySQL 8.0.)

I have some SQL scripts that try to read and write some of these fields (mainly user_name, user_real_name, user_email, user_password), but the data format change breaks these SQL scripts.

Could someone explain what binary encoding is being used, and how I might change my SQL scripts so that they are able to read and write the data using the binary encoding? (Or, alternatively, is there an option to not use the binary encoding and to go back to using plain text?)

Thanks Mike