[yorwba]

Indeed displaying CJK texts in wrong fonts won't do anything to change the meaning and people who can read it in one font can read it in any font. They might complain that it looks ugly because that one stroke should be slightly longer and have a different angle, but those are ultimately aesthetic preferences that don't affect readability.

Even before Unicode, it was established practice that documents mixing Chinese and Japanese would use the same encoding for both and roughly nobody would bother to pick an ugly font for the foreign-language text to make it look appropriately different.

Unicode rightly decided that the fine details of appearance are left to fonts. Otherwise you'd also need e.g. a bunch of extra codepoints so that early-20th-century handwritten letters in German can have their look accurately preserved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin

[numpad0]

You can't mix encodings in a single file. A file has one encoding only. It was not possible before Unicode to mix two languages in a single file, whether the languages involved were Chinese or Japanese or French(English was an exception).

Now, if a file was encoded in Unicode, and/or if it was in such document format that support inline font specification, such as HTML, then you could mix two languages without having to stick to one language by e.g. wrapping <font face=Helvetica>paragraphs and words</font> <font face=Futura>with tags</font>.

My point is, it seems that the author is not aware that each of CJK languages are only understood within each countries, in both writings and speeches, and that's somewhat peculiar.

[ablob]

You may not be able to mix encodings, but mixing languages has always been possible. If you used a French encoding you would be able to write in English, but not the other way around. I'd wager there are similar cases for cyrillic text. What Unicode gave us is its universality (heh). You don't have to carefully select an encoding able to represent the languages you wish to use anymore.