Depends on what you want to index into it for. I'll admit that once upon a time I opposed adding a "truncate at N characters" template helper to Django since there was a real risk it would cut in the middle of a grapheme cluster, and I don't particularly care for the compromise that ended up getting it added (it normalizes the string-to-truncate to a composed form first to try to minimize the chance of slicing at a bad spot).

But when you get right down to it, what I do for a living is write web applications, and sometimes I have to write validation that cares about length, or about finding specific things in specific positions, and so indexing into a string is something I have do to from time to time, and I'd rather have it behave as a sequence of code points than have it behave as a sequence of bytes in a variable-width encoding.

As to whether UTF-8 forces people to deal with Unicode up-front, I very strongly disagree; UTF-8 literally has as a design goal that it puts off your need to think about anything that isn't ASCII.