Isn't "turns out there are _lots_ of look-alikes, often literally pixel-for-pixel identical in most fonts at all sizes, in the unicode tables and that might cause some confusion when parsing text" like.. lesson 101 for unicode?

At any rate, I find the conclusion a bit hilarious: "Ah, the input text uses that symbol that very explicitly DOES NOT MEAN 'minus', it _ONLY_ means hyphen, and would be _the_ unicode solution if for whatever reason you want to render the notion: Hyphen followed by a _positive_ cash amount".. and.. I will completely mess up the whole point and just treat it as a minus sign after all.

What, pray tell, is the point of having all those semantically different but visually identical things in unicode when folks don't even acknowledge that what they are doing is fundamentally at odds with the very text they are reading?