I had a follow up thread with the author on Twitter, and one part of the talk ventured into if UTF-8 made sense for Eastern scripts. I looped in one of my ex Apple colleagues who worked on the transition of Swift from UTF-16 (the Mac default) to UTF-8 for the rationale why this made sense.
That led to a whole discussion of the benefits of self synchronising bytes in UTF-8 as well as a gratuitous self promotion of my “history of Unicode” talk at https://speakerdeck.com/alblue/a-brief-history-of-unicode
The end of the Twitter thread is here, if you’re interested: