Mostly agree with the author but hadn't thought terribly deeply about it in the past.

The N/`CHAR` data type has served as somewhat of a code smell. I use the following approach when deciding (against) selecting fixed-width char types:

((1)) Is it ALWAYS a single character? Yes: use N/CHAR(1) No ... ((2)) Is it ALWAYS fixed width? No, use VARCHAR. ((3)) Is there a more appropriate type to use for the fixed-width data.

The third item tends to be the killer of CHAR(x>1). Too often the underlying data was converted to a fixed width string and stored that way when it should have been stored using a different type. I've seen everything from GUIDs-as-text which could be UNIQUEIDENTIFIERs to CSS hex codes that could be stored as integer values.*