Now try adding it in a code block. PerlMonks is infamously using latin-1 instead of UTF-8. Kinda weakens your point...

I'm not actually disagreeing with your point, though. I'm all for encoding the source code using UTF-8, in which case use utf8; needs to be used. But I don't think non-ASCII should be blindly used in the source file either. There are still many problems that can arise.