Strings in Arduino are a special type. In simple C strings are just arrays of characters, and you could transfer that. But it’s horribly inefficient. And the library has a limit of 255 bytes of data, or only 255 characters in a string.
So if you really wanted, you would have to convert strings to arrays of characters before sending them via ET.
But what are you really trying to do? Just send status messages?
If I have an 8-position integer array, a 16-position integer array, and an unsigned long integer, is that just 52 bytes (2×8 + 2×16 + 1×4), or is there additional overhead from the structure itself?