Are you American? Americans always think that changing the encoding is a minor detail.
Guess what, changing the default encoding breaks every language that is not English.
Guess what, changing the default encoding breaks every language that is not English.
Characters are encoded in one byte and ascii leaves the highest 128 characters undefined. They are interpreted system-wise, depends on the locale and user settings.
>>> b"abc\xf0".decode("ascii")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf0 in position 3
But if the changelog is truthful, and the change is from ASCII to UTF-8, things should not break - at least not to any great extent.