And they still don't fix the escaping problem. You might as well use a niche utf8 emoji as a separator. Editors at least know how to consistently render an emoji.
As a co-op student I used a library to achieve fool proof encoding in csv so it escaped and quoted everything as necessary so commas,\, and quotes and any other character could be included in the data, but it was rejected since the plain text files were difficult to read and edit by hand!
I agree. So if we don't need this hand crafted and for human consumption, we may as well just use some TLV or LV encoding instead of the CSV madness of separators and escaping. CSV is basically designed for hand crafting.
They are also easy to read, perhaps easier than a 'space' or other character. Although this could be because we are just used to seeing data eg CSV in this way