Anyone else thinks that we missed an opportunity to make text much simpler to deal with by not increasing the size of a byte from 8 to 32 bits when we moved fro

Anyone else thinks that we missed an opportunity to make text much simpler to deal with by not increasing the size of a byte from 8 to 32 bits when we moved from 32-bit to 64-bit word length CPUs ? I mean, isn't the 7-bit ASCII text the reason why the byte length was standardized to the next power of two bits ? (With e-mail still supporting non-padded 7-bit ASCII until recently for performance reasons.)