I suspect the author does not about the first bit being 1 thing.

utf8 is magic.

You can assume US ASCII for lots of very useful text protocols , like http and Stomp and not care what the variable string bytes mean.

Soooo many software architects don't grok the magic of it.

You can define 8bit parser that check for "a:"(some string)\n

and work with a shit load of human languages.

The company I work for does not realise that most of f the 50 year old legacy C it has is fine with utf8 for all the arbitrary fixed length or \0 terminated strings it stores.