feat!: handful of fixes and improvements to utility methods

[vishwa2710]

Apologies in advance for grouping so many things in a single MR.

• It's a general cleanup of a few inconsistencies our API for the utilities
• Add a from_dict method to create a state for the python object
• Fix some docstrings
• Improve the coerce_to_interval converter

[codecov[bot]]

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests :white_check_mark:

Project coverage is 90.87%. Comparing base (133716b) to head (eea4c31). Report is 1 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

```diff @@ Coverage Diff @@ ## main #435 +/- ## ======================================= Coverage 90.87% 90.87% ======================================= Files 84 84 Lines 8359 8359 ======================================= Hits 7596 7596 Misses 763 763 ```

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