meanwhile the Unicode consortium has been hard at work since 1991 to make it possible to encode up to 2.8 MB -- more than enough for most images, short videos, or many PDF files -- in a single character.
Are you referring to UTF-8? If so, this is misleading as you can encode up to 2^21 + 2^16 + 2^11 + 2^7 = 2,164,864 code points, which is not the same as encoding bytes in a single character.
I was making a joke about how ridiculously large Unicode is. Obviously it is not 2 million+ bytes per character! (But the fact that you didn't consider my joke obvious speaks volumes).