author here -- agreed on all fronts. Mentioned this in the other comment but I approached the topic from a relatively narrow perspective (I was working on a specific project at the time)

I think it's worth including these things in a future update to the post, but I didn't have the time / need to explore it back then.

In the meantime, I'd point to the following post on Unicode that remains very nice to read >20 years later: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...