Exactly. All modern CPUs are so standardized that there is little reason to store all the data in ASCII text. It’s so much faster and less complicated to just keep the raw binary on disk.

That’s only been my experience with software that depends on many different libraries. And it’s extra painful when you find out that it needs hyper specific versions of libraries that are older than the ones you have already installed. Rust is only painless because it just downloads all the right dependencies.

Some old software does use 8-Bit ASCII for special/locale specific characters. Also there is this Unicode hack where the last bit is used to determine if the byte is part of a multi-byte sequence.

This isn’t limited to JS. Too many times have I seen someone ask a question of how to do XYZ in language ABC where most of the replies were some form of “Just use this library bro” while not actually answering the question. And usually the library that’s being suggested is some big monolith that implements a ton of shit that no one really uses.