Well in my case, I don't have to worry about filename spoofing, or even filenames being too similar, for my own directory of records/archives. The strangeness

Well in my case, I don't have to worry about filename spoofing, or even filenames being too similar, for my own directory of records/archives. The strangeness of a normalizing filesystem, is that you can try to open a filename (with accent, NFC), and it works. Then, a readdir() doesn't list that exact filename byte sequence (you happen to get one that's extremely similar, but NFD). On linux it always does, there's no normalization, exactly what you open is exactly what's listed. This really is an awefully nice simplification, for this layer of abstraction. But you could argue that I'm just accustomed to the tradeoffs of it by this point.