You are confusing characters with glyphs. A glyph is a written symbol.

And you seem to be conflating characters and letters. There are fewer letters in the standard alphabet than we have characters for the same, largely because we do distinguish between some letter forms.

I suppose you could imagine a world where we don't, in fact, do this with just the character code. Seems fairly different from where we are, though?

I thought that if they're different glyphs they're different characters.

Surely the fact that they're represented differently in ASCII means ASCII regards them as different characters?

Whether they're different glyphs or not depends on the font.

Are the words hello and HELLO spelled differently? I am pretty squarely in the camp that filesystems should be case sensitive (perhaps with an insensitive shell on top), but I would not consider those two words as having a different spelling. To me that means they are the same sequence of characters.

When you press the "E" key on a US keyboard and "e" comes out, do you return the keyboard because it's broken? If not, then you know what definition I'm using even if I misnamed it.