[chrisan]

Must have been more than 10 years ago when utf8mb4 was added where you don't have to activate any kind of special settings.

I was using MSSQL prior to 2010 so I have no idea of MySQL unicode handling before that

[lmm]

> Must have been more than 10 years ago when utf8mb4 was added where you don't have to activate any kind of special settings.

Less than 10 years ago; MySQL 5.5 went GA in December 2010.