And now it's \Users, presumably because after 20 years, Microsoft gave up?
Only if you assume that people rarely have spaces in their Windows login names (e.g. "Joe Smith").
Either that, or Windows users have learned to not be scared of spaces in filenames, usernames, and their own literal names.
non-Western Windows users always knew never to use anything outside ASCII for usernames, passwords, or any programmatically used identifiers. It's English users that haven't learned it.
The official workaround at runtime is to use the "\\?\" prefix with an absolute path to create an unrestricted verbatim pathname. For instance, the fs::canonicalize() function in Rust will always return such a pathname, to many programmers' dismay, since outside tools often choke on them.
The unofficial workaround is to set the undocumented IsLongPathAwareProcess bit in the process's PEB. The Go runtime does this, but silently falls back to "\\?\" prefixes if the Windows version is too old.
(Note that in general, canonicalizing paths is safer on Windows than on Unix-like systems, since open directories cannot be renamed.)