I18n is something like security, it takes a lot of effort to get right, people often don’t know that their assumptions are subtly wrong, and getting them right often requires using a more complicated solution. No wonder programmers just cop out and settle for ASCII, naïve string comparisons, first name & surname fields, etc.

And the problems go quite deep, all the way down to standard libraries and programming languages. The Swift debate about correct and performant Unicode string processing was very interesting – people are very hard to convince that string is not a collection of characters randomly accessible with integer indexes.