alt Hacker NewsHomoglyph attacks and RTL work just as well in UTF-16. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are different character encodings for the same character set (Unicode).
That being said, Windows permits unpaired surrogates in its "UTF-16" strings, even though that is not actually valid UTF-16. Similarly, many Linux APIs accept arbitrary bytes, not just valid UTF-8.
Of course. I was trying to say that it would be nice to limit certain variables to an ASCII charset, or ASCII+umlaut+accents without any of the 10k other UTF8 shenanigans.