In the api, wherever paths are commonly used, built-in support for pathlib.Path objects should be added. For example, the following:

rc = ReplicaCatalog()\
.add_replica("local", "initial_input_file.txt", str(Path(_file_).parent.resolve() / "initial_input_file.txt"))

should instead be:

rc = ReplicaCatalog()\
.add_replica("local", "initial_input_file.txt", Path(_file_).parent.resolve() / "initial_input_file.txt")