What's the right way?
UTF-8
When D was first implemented, circa 2000, it wasn't clear whether UTF-8, UTF-16, or UTF-32 was going to be the winner. So D supported all three.
utf8, for essentially the reasons mentioned in this manifesto: https://utf8everywhere.org/
Yep. Notably supported by go, python3, rust and swift. And probably all new programming languages created from here on.