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.

It's way better to just use a DBMS that supports enums. I know SQL server isn't one of those but I still don't store my coded values as strings.

Those are all single byte characters in UTF-8.