> Unicode is a requirement everywhere human language is used

Strange then how it was not a requirement for many, many years.

Just to be pedantic, those characters are in 'ANSI'/CP1252 and would be fine in a varchar on many systems.

Not that I disagree — Win32/C#/Java/etc have 16-bit characters, your entire system is already 'paying the price', so weird to get frugal here.

Also less awkward to make it right the first time, instead of explaining why someone can’t type their name or an emoji

I am talking about coded values, like Status = 'A', 'B' or 'C'

Taking double the space for this stuff is a waste of resources and nobody usually cares about extended characters here in English language systems at least they just want something more readable than integers when querying and debugging the data. End users will see longer descriptions joined from code tables or from app caches which can have unicode.