I don't want to debate, I just want to note that as a person who writes $1_G$ everyday, and also maintain Unicode char'd codebases (Agda) where have subscript G would be life saving: We understand that Unicode people think ^x _x is a formatting issue. It simply isn't any more than quotes, parenthesis, brackets are formatting. Subscript and superscript are their own thing regardless of formatting and they carry meaning and semantics. The simplest proof is $^{-1}$ which means "inverse" and has nothing to do with minus or 1 symbol, it's not a formatting thereof, it simply means "inverse", the same way recycle emoji mean "recycle".