Comment by Dwedit

It's still useful to use MSVCRT in certain circumstances, such as targeting the earliest 64-bit versions of Windows.

As for UTF-8 support, it's the manifest file that determines whether Windows sets the ANSI code page to UTF-8. (There's also an undocumented API function that resets the code page for GetACP and the Rtl functions that convert ANSI into Unicode. But this would run after all the other DLLs have finished loading.) Having the code page correct is enough to support Unicode filenames and Unicode text in the GUI.

It just won't provide UTF-8 locale support for the standard C library.