The author mentioned MariaDB in the intro and the went on about MySQL, not sure which he actually used.
I think the latest recommendation for MySQL was utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci and utf8mb4_general_ci for MariaDB.
While I agree about the Postgres recommendation, it's a non-starter in the PHP world, unless doing something from scratch. Even then, the support for MySQL/MariaDB is much better.