> That's a very narrow view of the world.

Yes, it is. Unicode has undergone major mission creep, thinking it is now a font language and a formatting language. Naturally, this has lead to making it a vector for malicious actors. (The direction reversing thing has been used to insert malicious text that isn't visible to the reader.)

> Unicode is not exclusively for coding

I never mentioned coding.

> They didn't need computers

Unicode is for characters, not formatting. Formatting is what HTML is for, and many other formatting standards. Neither is it for meaning.