Comment by da_chicken

I would be more critical of Microsoft choosing to support UCS-2/UTF-16 if Microsoft hadn't completed their implementation of Unicode support in the 90s and then been pretty consistent with it.

Meanwhile Linux had a years long blowout in the early 2000s over switching to UTF-8 from Latin-1. And you can still encounter Linux programs that choke on UTF-8 text files or multi-byte characters 30 years later (`tr` being the one I can think of offhand). AFAIK, a shebang is still incompatible with a UTF-8 byte order mark. Yes, the UTF-8 BOM is both optional and unnecessary, but it's also explicitly allowed by the spec.