Yup, I totally agree that LuaLaTeX and BibLaTeX are awesome; that was even my platform for the (uncontested) TUG board election [0]. But UTF-8 mostly just works with LaTeX these days, regardless of the engine: even pdfLaTeX has defaulted to UTF-8 since 2017 [1]. Fonts are still a mess in pdfTeX though, so I'll definitely second your fontspec+LuaLaTeX recommendation.