[inferiorhuman]

I'm inclined to agree that some manner of backwards compatibility is important. A middle ground with a path towards exclusive UTF-8 use seems like a fine compromise. However three things come to mind:

* LSP is being used outside of VSCode, and while UTF-16 may be helpful in that case it's a hinderance for others.

* Institutional knowledge of UTF-16 ain't great at Microsoft either. Github broke rendering of multibyte characters and it took a random GH user to the devs explain how multibyte characters and strings interact in Javascript before that got fixed.

* [insert lots of handwaving about the downsides of electron]