I don't think that's what he meant. A surrogate pair in UTF-16 is still referring to a single code point. It's a good point that it's a place where people could screw up in dealing with Unicode, but it doesn't match his complaint.
What does match is the fact that you can use a huge number of combining characters [1] to form a single glyph; each combining character and the base are a code point, so in order to figure out how many glyphs there are you have to iterate with the knowledge of what code points are combining characters.
What does match is the fact that you can use a huge number of combining characters [1] to form a single glyph; each combining character and the base are a code point, so in order to figure out how many glyphs there are you have to iterate with the knowledge of what code points are combining characters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character