Not to be contradictory, but unicode is not a specific encoding. ufc-8 is an encoding (with a non specific length) and utf-32 is an encoding of a Unicode code point with a specific length.

Most people talking about characters in Unicode are referring to grapheme clusters, and I assume the parent is too, since they are in fact defined by Unicode and vary in length in all encodings, hence their answer of "no" to the GP.