Viewing profile — bigin

So you disagree with the linked blog post then? I mean this entire discussion is based on the premise that HFS+ performs normalization and APFS does not. The disrcepancy means that…

HFS+ did perform normalization on a file system level and stored strings as utf-16 so it's not true for HFS+.

So it is correct then, the file system doesn't concern itself with normalization. File names are stored internally as utf-8 strings which are just a sequence of bytes.