Text fields that users can type into directly especially multiline tend to need unicode but they are far fewer.
Unicode is a requirement everywhere human language is used, from Earth to the Boöotes Void.
Taking double the space for this stuff is a waste of resources and nobody usually cares about extended characters here in English language systems at least they just want something more readable than integers when querying and debugging the data. End users will see longer descriptions joined from code tables or from app caches which can have unicode.
Typical code tables with code, description and anything else needed for that value which the user can configure in the app.
Sure you can use integers instead of codes, now all your results look like 1, 2, 3, 4 for all your coded columns when trying to debug or write ad-hoc stuff. Also ints are not variable length so your wasting space for short codes and you have to know ahead time if its only going to be 1,2,4 or 8 bytes.
Not that I disagree — Win32/C#/Java/etc have 16-bit characters, your entire system is already 'paying the price', so weird to get frugal here.
Strange then how it was not a requirement for many, many years.
Don’t confuse people groaning and putting up with limitations as justifying those limitations.
Shared by other European languages, like ou for ö in German, kalimera for καλημέρα, and so on all around the world in non-English speaking countries during the early days of computing.
