If you think that's fun, just wait until you encounter the clowns who copy-paste random shit directly out of Word docs containing C1 control codes mascarading as "smart quotes" into your UTF-8 source.
I've done that before, but copying from web pages that have randomly used smart quotes (or whatever they are actually called) in command line samples.
Very annoying!
The useless utf-8 BOM is 3 bytes ... were you also getting utf-16 encoded text?
The UTF-8 BOM still has some uses, unfortunately. I had to convince Excel to parse a CSV file as UTF-8 and inserting a BOM at the beginning of the file was the easiest solution.
Powershell has stopped doing that in that newer version. I think since 6 or 7. On Windows 10 you do have to install it separately though.