Comment by pimterry

In my case, and for many people writing desktop software, and for absolutely everybody writing open-source tools or libraries, unfortunately you can't control the environment.

Non-ASCII paths are extremely common (e.g. the user's home directory on Windows, for the large majority of users outside the English-speaking world) and spaces, punctuation and weirder characters will definitely happen when you least expect it.

Yes if you can avoid it then absolutely that's great, but I don't think most people can.

It's also not usually very difficult to deal with, as long as you actually spot the issue in the first place.