To be fair, I do enjoy that you can start programs like Rollercoaster Tycoon, written mostly in assembly, still in Windows 7 (maybe even newer, I haven't used Windows in a while) and it mostly all works. I'm not aware that there are characters that can't be represented by the UTF-16 encoding (that will, according to the article, also widen further when necessary) which has been in use for decades now. I don't feel like this is character encoding still being a mess as much as legacy causing a mess: without those legacy binaries, translation wouldn't be needed and there wouldn't be a problem since the newer encoding is long there
I find encoding to be a mostly solved problem in any software that supports /UTF-[0-9]+/. Can't remember the last time I ran into an encoding issue, maybe it was when I ran PHP on a Windows server years and years ago, which defaulted to passing query parameters in ISO-8859-15 or something, which didn't work with html escaping (returned a blank string, so failing in a safe and obvious way iirc) if you didn't specify the character set. I personally converted, or set, everything I create or use to UTF-8 by now
I find encoding to be a mostly solved problem in any software that supports /UTF-[0-9]+/. Can't remember the last time I ran into an encoding issue, maybe it was when I ran PHP on a Windows server years and years ago, which defaulted to passing query parameters in ISO-8859-15 or something, which didn't work with html escaping (returned a blank string, so failing in a safe and obvious way iirc) if you didn't specify the character set. I personally converted, or set, everything I create or use to UTF-8 by now