I'm not so sure other languages do that any better (nodejs doesn't even support non-unicode filenames at all for instance). Modern python does a pretty good job at supporting unicode, very far away from being a "Mess" that's just very much not true at all. People always like to hate on python but then other languages supposedly designed by actually capable people do mess up other stuff all the time. Look at how the great Haskell represents strings for instance and what a clusterfuck[1] that is.
[1] https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2017/5/15/untangling-haskells-str...