I've never done any fuzzing personally, but wouldn't this be discoverable internally during testing? I would think that they would attempt sending all possible characters, especially because they've had issues with this in the past.
Yes. This seems like a somewhat embarrassing fail in terms of whatever automated testing Apple does. It's a pretty minimal and restricted case of fuzzing, in fact I'm not sure it'd qualify as "fuzzing" at all because here the crasher is just an actual Unicode character, part of a fixed set that can be completely run through in deterministic time. Unicode is certainly large in human terms but in terms of automated test data sets it's not.
Given the notorious difficulties and edge cases Unicode parsing has long created, testing every single individual character in Unicode as part of standard unit/regression testing seems like something that should just be done as a bare minimum for an operating system or parsing framework/library release. That's not to say there wouldn't be more complex inputs that would cause problems that sufficient fuzzing could discover, but this kind of a error from a single real language character shouldn't have slipped through, it's not random.
Unicode and image/document handling frameworks are both areas that should have extensive fuzzing as well as deterministic input sets for testing. They shouldn't need to be messed with much either once they're "done", so in the case of an org like Apple this is the sort of place where it might even make sense to really devote resources to getting at least some parts of it formally verified.