It's also some surprise internal representation as utf-16; that's at least still in the realm of Unicode. Would also expect there's utf-32 still floating around somewhere, but I couldn't tell you where.

And is mysql still doing that thing with utf8 as a noob trap and utf8_for_real_we_mean_it_this_time_honest or whatever they called it as normal utf8?

Me too. To this Day our national Electric invoice standard uses ISO-8859-15. An that's just fine until somebody feels the need to have a look with Notepad, add a random space and save the file.

Notepad then helpfully changes the encoding to UTF-16 and the whole patch errors out somewhere down the chain.

All because of java