Yeah, for example it's how Java stores strings to this day. But I think it's more or less never transmitted over the Network.
And even Swift is designed so the strings can be utf8 or utf16 for cheap objc interop reasons.
Discarding compatibility with 2 of the top ~5 most widely used languages kind of reflects how disconnected the author of this is from the technical realities if any fixed utf8 was feasible outside of the most toy use cases.