The article makes it a point that substrings, reversing text (when does anyone ever do that, actually, apart from coding exercises?) don't even work naïvely whe

The article makes it a point that substrings, reversing text (when does anyone ever do that, actually, apart from coding exercises?) don't even work naïvely when you consider UTF-32. Yes, the code unit / code point dichotomy is annoying and plenty of people don't know about it, but there are many more pitfalls in Unicode when you don't know what you do. If you have an easy solution of deprecating UTF-16 everywhere where it's used (while not breaking anything that currently works), I'm all ears. Unicode is a pragmatic, not a perfect, standard and there are historical mistakes. But for better or for worse they exist and will probably stay.