You've never had to render a name like Daniële? Never used non-breaking space on website for better text layout? Never read text that used any — em-dashes —? N

You've never had to render a name like Daniële? Never used non-breaking space on website for better text layout? Never read text that used any — em-dashes —? No currencies other than the dollar ever mentioned, and to cap it all off, never seen an emoji? I agree that unicode is ugly and stupid. But despite all that it persists, because it is the least stupid of all encodings. It's not like the ASCII characters of: Form Feed (0C), Device Control 1 through 4 (11 through 14), group separator (1D), and most other non-printable ASCII characters are a reasonable use of byte-space, or are useful to attempt to render to the screen. And that is before you get into hijinks that can be played with backspace and del characters if they are rendered naively. (Though I love backspace for progress bars in the terminal)