[jcranmer]

Han unification predates Unicode by about a decade; most of the early work in Unicode largely consists of copy-pasting the Japanese and Chinese governments' standards for unified CJK ideographs. Indeed, read some of the early histories of Han unification (e.g., https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/app...), and you'll notice that there's a lot of liasoning with East Asian technology groups in East Asian cities going on. I don't think any East Asian government representatives would have actually objected to Han unification!

It's also worth noting that the original goal of Unicode wasn't to be able to faithfully represent all text, but rather to faithfully represent existing character sets. Only later do you get the impetus to actually include everything, as people become a lot less tolerant of "computer can't actually represent <X>" scenarios. Note too that a lot of the Han unification criticisms basically fall into the same bucket as, say, Medievalists, who want to preserve certain details of their source texts more faithfully than was the norm for computer systems in the 1980s.