"I'm guessing you're a systemd developer."
Sorry, I'm an assembler/C/C++ developer. Who started when Linux didn't exist yet. And who always hated those who can't understand data structures and think text files are good because they can read them for debugging - totally unable to use more sophisticated debugging techniques than printf() or log files.
The web took IT backwards at least twenty years, probably more. Sure, just throw more CPU GHz and cores at processing text files back and forth...
IT is becoming a mess because people start to write code before understanding programming.
And if you all can't understand why an UTF file (or any other encoding, for the matter) is not a text file, there's little I can do for you, sorry. Keep on thinking in ASCII7, your brain has too little RAM and too few GHz.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
