> There are many reasons why UTF-8 is a better encoding but UTF-16 does at least have the benefit of being simpler. Every scalar value is either encoded as a single unit or a pair of units (leading surrogate + trailing surrogate).

UTF16 is really not noticeably simpler. Decoding UTF8 is really rather straightforward in any language which has even minimal bit-twiddling abilities.

And that’s assuming you need to write your own encoder or decoder, which seems unlikely.