Yes, the structure could still help resync if you have a bitstream and not a bytestream (you could identify the MSBs of bytes from their very different statisti

Yes, the structure could still help resync if you have a bitstream and not a bytestream (you could identify the MSBs of bytes from their very different statistical behavior), but it isn't as trivial as skipping continuation bytes, those with '10' in the most significant position. You'd need to track all 8 shift positions until you find the one that looks like UTF-8.