> It's not a problem on Windows or Linux filesystems because Windows and Linux don't provide a half-assed normalization scheme that lets me fairly easily create files that can't be accessed
This is only true if you're talking about the kernel APIs. Unfortunately, filenames come from a variety of sources and it's easy to find tools which inconsistently normalize them – e.g. simply copying and pasting a name from a Word doc, web page, etc. which has different normalization than whatever originally created the file – or which produce either duplicate error messages or confusing error messages because the normalization form used in a file doesn't match the normalization form written on disk.
I've encountered variations of this problem on all three systems. No approach is going to handle 100% of the filenames in the wild and all of them will require extra care in the user-interface which may or may not have been done – e.g. the Windows Explorer still provides no way to tell why Café.txt and Café.txt are not the same file – and fixing the cases where programs are internally inconsistent. APFS switching will expose some programs which were unsafe before but since it's consistent with the other common filesystems it'll remove the need for every archive, version control, etc. system to either special-case or break.
This is only true if you're talking about the kernel APIs. Unfortunately, filenames come from a variety of sources and it's easy to find tools which inconsistently normalize them – e.g. simply copying and pasting a name from a Word doc, web page, etc. which has different normalization than whatever originally created the file – or which produce either duplicate error messages or confusing error messages because the normalization form used in a file doesn't match the normalization form written on disk.
I've encountered variations of this problem on all three systems. No approach is going to handle 100% of the filenames in the wild and all of them will require extra care in the user-interface which may or may not have been done – e.g. the Windows Explorer still provides no way to tell why Café.txt and Café.txt are not the same file – and fixing the cases where programs are internally inconsistent. APFS switching will expose some programs which were unsafe before but since it's consistent with the other common filesystems it'll remove the need for every archive, version control, etc. system to either special-case or break.