tree: Improve non-schema aware typing

[CraigMacomber]

Description

See changeset

Breaking Changes

See changeset

Reviewer Guidance

The review process is outlined on this wiki page.

This is a rather risky change, as it could break some use-cases due to typing changes. These are use cases we never really intended to support, and there should be alternatives, but this could cause some breakage when integrating.

Extra care should be given to evaluating if this is ok to release in a minor version. A prerelease build, and testing by some representative customers would likely be a good idea.