By that same argument/logic you might as well argue cave paintings are superior over text. It traces back probably over 50000 years and is still universal today and doesn't even require understanding of a specific language - and it still forms the basis of most of society now. (art, painting, photographs, graffiti, ...)
Your reply is in text. Would you care to link a set of paintings to express your argument instead?
That's the point: take an arbitrary criterion, end up with an arbitrary answer.
It’s also in ascii, is that superior to all other character sets, or an accident of history?
> It’s also in ascii
No it isn't:
> 10:48:55.380 document.location.href
> 10:48:55.384 "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26166797"
> 10:48:57.723 document.characterSet
> 10:48:57.726 "UTF-8"
If it was really Unicode I could use an eye roll emoji to reply with a succinct image, instead of all these words to describe my reaction.
That's HN filtering your input, nothing to do with the actual encoding.
Plenty of non-ASCII symbols show up perfectly fine. For example, '£'.