Maybe for file handling in C++, but DirectX/HLSL is the best Graphics API I've worked with and C# is easily my favorite language to develop in. It's easy for us to talk shit about Win32 today, 30 years after it was initially developed, but there are myriad historical reasons why UTF-16 is used by Java, Windows, and other languages/runtime environments and why it's not simple to just break compatibility with decades of software running at hospitals and financial trading firms because the 32 year old armchair experts at HN said so.

According to wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Coded_Character_Set

> The UCS has over 1.1 million possible code points available for use/allocation, but only the first 65,536, which is the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), had entered into common use before 2000. This situation began changing when the People's Republic of China (PRC) ruled in 2006 that all software sold in its jurisdiction would have to support GB 18030. This required software intended for sale in the PRC to move beyond the BMP.

I will take Win32 over anything related to X Windows, OpenGL and Vulkan, with pleasure.

True. They broke the basic Windows search functionality some time in 2007 and broke Outlook search around 2013 and neither of which have been fixed since.