Comment by Arnt

Ah, let's have a long discussion of this.

Unicode avoids "different" and "same", https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr15/ uses phrases like compatibility equivalence.

The whole thing is complicated, because it actually is complicated in the real world. You can spell the name of Gießen "Giessen" and most Germans consider it correct even if not ideal, but spelling Massachusetts "Maßachusetts" is plainly wrong in German text. The relationship between ß and ss isn't symmetric. Unicode captures that complexity, when you get into the fine details.