I remember this as well on IRCNet on a few German channels. Basically mostly it was decided that everyone had to configure ISO-8859-1 (or ascii) or be kicked,

I remember this as well on IRCNet on a few German channels. Basically mostly it was decided that everyone had to configure ISO-8859-1 (or ascii) or be kicked, and at some point the majority of ops then decided that now UTF-8 was correct. It didn't feel great a lot of the time, but to be fair those were communities governed by some people and the barrier to entry was configuring your client correctly. I might be misremembering but most bigger channels kinda agreed on the timeline, so they all switched to UTF-8 around the same time, so it kinda worked.