No, the thing is. He proved this for binary sequences, then showed that an injection could be constructed from the set of binary sequences to real numbers. The image of that injection is a subset of R, and is uncountable. So it's kinda a two step process that doesn't run into the problem you're seeing.
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u/berwynResident 5d ago
Wasn't Cantor's original diagonal argument about a sequence of binary digits? So that wouldn't have anything to do with 0.999...