Historically, this is because Windows NT used UCS-2 [0]. Unicode only moved to beyond 65536 characters, and introduced the concept of surrogate pairs, with Unic

Historically, this is because Windows NT used UCS-2 [0]. Unicode only moved to beyond 65536 characters, and introduced the concept of surrogate pairs, with Unicode 2.0 in 1996. [0] https://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#utf16-11 https://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#utf16-11