ASCII was sane (give or take minor annoyances like hexadecimal digits or DEL); the problem was it was too narrowly scoped for general-purpose use. In the context it was actually developed for (exclusively English text on machines that struggled (or didn't bother) to even render 256 different characters, nevermind thousands), ASCII was a broadly-reasonable character encoding that even had half the encoding space left over for something like UTF-8 to build a sensible, more general-purpose encoding in.

Unfortunately, we got specifically UTF-8, with the dumpster fire that is Unicode tied around its neck like a string of albatrosses.