Cling to 16 bit codepoints sounds like a legitimate explanation? Latin and Cyrillic didn't would have saved no relevant amount of space.
It looks like the CJK unified space is over 20,000 characters, so that's a real technical magnitude distinction compared to Latin and Cyrillic. "Asian languages be damned" seems like a bad faith read, compared to "Java and Windows char is 16 bits and that will never change realistically" (and in fact they still haven't, even in 2026 things which rely on UTF16 instead of UCS2 are still commonly bugged unfortunately)
It looks like the CJK unified space is over 20,000 characters, so that's a real technical magnitude distinction compared to Latin and Cyrillic. "Asian languages be damned" seems like a bad faith read, compared to "Java and Windows char is 16 bits and that will never change realistically" (and in fact they still haven't, even in 2026 things which rely on UTF16 instead of UCS2 are still commonly bugged unfortunately)