Sometimes a computer restart does the trick.

Do you use Microsoft Windows, by any chance?

It is clear that my views on the subject are unwelcome here.

All views are welcome here.

Views which are unsupported by evidence, logic and/or which ignore the current state of the Perl world may well have their flaws exposed. Repeated exhortations of those views, despite having had their flaws exposed, are likely to be treated as trollery.

Perl will not break more than 3 decades of backwards compatibility by switching to a different default encoding. You've been shown many ways to use unicode easily with Perl but, for your own reasons, choose not to. That's on you, not us, nor p5p, nor TPF, nor anyone else.

However, the good news for you is that Perl is open source and uses the Artistic Licence. You may fork it and convert it to use a different default encoding. You could release this as uniperl and all the folks who agree with you could download and use it, just like they can with rperl. Best of luck with it!