microtonal parent
You said I always hear rosy thing about how polished the Apple ecosystem is. But this more sounds like a bug in your software. Many accented characters have two representations in Unicode, so you always have to normalize strings before making comparisons or use a comparison function that takes different encodings into account.
It sounds like this would be a nightmare in Unix filenames; even if everything in my system is perfectly clean utf-8, I could be trying to open "café.txt" and get a No such file or directory error because the input has é encoded a different way from what is saved on disk. You would need to list the directory contents, decode everything, perform the comparison in Unicode code points, and pray there is no more than one match. Any web UI that deals with files would have this kind of issues.
Yeah. Though it really depends on the system.
Some older filesystems, like HFS+ would normalize filenames. In APFS Apple decided not to normalize file names, but this caused a lot of issues. Later they have made APFS normalization-insensitive (so you cannot store two files with the same name, but different normalizations). Different normalizations are handled transparently by macOS frameworks.
On Linux with btrfs:
$ touch schön
$ cat $(echo -e "scho\u0308n")
cat: schön: No such file or directory
$ touch $(echo -e "scho\u0308n")
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 daniel daniel 0 Dec 17 12:00 schön
-rw-r--r-- 1 daniel daniel 0 Dec 17 12:00 schön
$ ls | hexdump -c
0000000 s c h o 314 210 n \n s c h 303 266 n \n
Edit: updated to make this copy-pastable.
I wonder if ZFS falls prey to the same issue. I've heard good things about it otherwise.
We learned that the hard way. Still, the basic dev expectation is to get the same thing out that they have put in. It shouldn't sound outrageous that we expected to get the same representation. That's all.
With all due respect, software development is complicated and it sounds like you just weren’t aware of this aspect of it. Which is fine. But it’s a bug in _your_ software, not Safari.
An alternative basic dev expectation is that given two different ways to represent the same thing, the software only gives you one canonical way.
Fix your expectations.