Comment by lyu07282

UTF-8 was a huge improvement for sure, but I was, 20-25 years ago, working with LATIN-1 (so 8 bit charcters) which was a struggle in the years it took for everything to switch to UTF-8, the compatibility with ASCII meant you only really notice something was wrong when the data had special characters not representable in ASCII but valid LATIN-1. So perhaps breaking backwards compatibility would've resulted in less data corruption overall.