Probably not. The author of this thread's article has incorrect history about UTF-8 being widely accepted in 1993. At least 4 different systems independently chose UCS2/UCS4 instead of UTF-8 in the early 1990s:
- Microsoft Windows NT 3.1
- Sun Java in 1995
- Netscape Javascript in 1995
- Python 2.x
Why? Because before 1996, the Unicode Consortium initially thought 16-bit 65k characters was "more than enough" based on the CJK unification first recommended by language experts from Asia. The wikipedia page on Unicode revision history shows the explosion of extra CJK chars in Unicode 3.1 which exceeded count of 65k didn't happen until 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Versions
The prevailing standard in 1993 was UCS-2 and not UTF-8. Considering that a huge revision of an operating system like Windows is a multi-year effort, they were really looking at what the standard was circa ~1991. So Rob Pike's napkin idea of UTF-8 in 1992 and then the later presentation at USENIX in January 1993 -- is really not relevant for a July 1993 release of Windows NT 3.1. The author writing in Dec 2021 has hindsight bias but MS/Java/Python just went with Unicode 1.x UCS2 which was logical at that time.