The GEDCOM7 decision to drop the character encoding and assume UTF-8 seems a bit myopic. Particularly when the existence of UTF-16 and UTF-32 imply that there is current insufficiency. And so UTF-8 is certainly not future‐proof.
The GEDCOM7 .ged reference file that everyone is supposed to test against:
https://gedcom.io/testfiles/gedcom70/maximal70.ged