I always thought you kind of need those directional control characters to correctly render bidi text? e.g. if you write something in Hebrew but include a Latin word/name (or the reverse).

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dcrazy 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is the job of the Bidi Algorithm: https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/

Of course, this is an “annex”, not part of the core Unicode spec. So in situations where you can’t rely on the presentation layer’s (correct) implementation of the Bidi algorithm, you can fall back to directional override/embedding characters.

	▲	acdha 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Over the years I’ve run into a few situations where the rules around neutral characters didn’t produce the right result and so we had to use the override characters to force the correct display. It’s completely a niche but very handy when you are mixing quotes within a complex text.

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layer8 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Read the parent’s link. The characters “to be avoided” are a particular special-purpose subset, not directional control characters in general.