You mean the coding= comment? Where are you shipping your code that that was actually a problem? I've never been on a project where we did that, let alone needed it.

Have you considered reducing review noise by using static analysis?

encode()/decode() have used UTF-8 as the default since Python 3.2 (soon, 15 years ago). This is about the default encoding for e.g. the "encoding" parameter of open().