It seems awkward, but it's not. It picks picks a deterministic default instead of a "whatever you have in your OS environment". It practice all these env confi

It seems awkward, but it's not. It picks picks a deterministic default instead of a "whatever you have in your OS environment". It practice all these env config initialization things are handled by the php.ini, and/or by a framework. (Plus using the mb_string ext is how any minimally sane string handling is done in PHP nowadays.) Yes, probably in ~10 years the PHP world too will move to a unicode by default setup :) But hey, progress!