> If new code isn't working naturally in UTF-8 in 2021 then it's wrong, period.

UTF-8 is a nuisance as an in-memory representation because the characters are variable size. You can't get the length of a string without parsing it start to end, and you can't get a character by index without parsing and counting all the previous ones. 16-bit characters (wchar_t, Java char, whatever NSStrings are made of, etc) work fine in 99% of the cases.

UTF-8 is indisputably a good encoding for when you're sending something over the network or putting it into a file or a database.