[Aaronmacaron]

Why would you treat e and é the same? Those are two different characters with different pronunciations. You also wouldn't treat capital i (I) and small L (l) the same just because they look similarly.

[mkempe]

Accents are generally considered unimportant in the context of a search, at least in French.

[hadrien01]

It's not just that é looks like e, é is the letter e with a diacritic [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic

[matt_the_bass]

In addition to the other replies, this is important for input by keyboards that are not languages with that accent. Us “dumb” Americans don’t know how to type that off the top of our heads.

Or on mobile. It’s a pain on many devices.