My god yes.

I'm building a new Wasm GC-based language and I'm trying to make as small as binaries as possible to target use cases like a module-per-UI-component, and strings are the biggest hinderance to that. Both for the code size and the slow JS interop.

Yeah it's really frustrating and JS string builtins are not a good fit for me as I do not want to deal with 16-bit code units.