You seem to be thinking of the abstraction as a concrete thing. A code point is like LLVM IR; an intermediary language for describing and converting between enc

You seem to be thinking of the abstraction as a concrete thing. A code point is like LLVM IR; an intermediary language for describing and converting between encodings. It is not a concrete thing in itself. The concrete thing we're encoding is human readable text. The atomic unit of which is the user perceived character. I'm curious, what use is knowing the number of code points in a string? It doesn't tell the user anything. It doesn't even tell the programmer anything actionable.