Bandages do stop bleeding. This was added via the healing rebalance patch a week or so before release.
Unless they are bugged and don’t work, which would not be surprising. But any heavy armor should absorb enough damage for you to survive, unless you were already pretty wounded.
I’ll test bandages vs bleeding here in a bit. I never did try to cure bleed with them myself.
Edit::
Okay tested. Bandages will heal through bleed and they cure it after 5 seconds when the healing ends.
Bleed normally lasts 20 seconds, so there’s plenty of time to test it out to see if it works.
I tested this by racking up 18 stacks of bleed from the dancers at The Den and then stepping off a cliff to get away from them. Then used a bandage.