It’s a shame that Microsoft is still lagging behind on proper Unicode support,

It's great outside the console, but I agree about the console. Microsoft's lack of attention to the shell and related features is disappointing to say the least.

bending over backwards to accomodate Microsoft-only idio(t)syncrasies

Baseless bashing. Unix has locales too. It's not Microsoft's fault that the following doesn't work on Windows:

use open IO => ':locale';
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