On point #3 — .normalize('NFD') alone isn't enough for search matching. After NFD you still need to strip combining marks (the combining-diacritical-marks block, regex /\p{Mn}/gu) or "café" and "cafe" will never match because the accent is a separate codepoint that the comparator sees. Bit of a footgun; nobody writes the full pipeline correctly the first time.
On point #3 — .normalize('NFD') alone isn't enough for search matching. After NFD you still need to strip combining marks (the combining-diacritical-marks block, regex /\p{Mn}/gu) or "café" and "cafe" will never match because the accent is a separate codepoint that the comparator sees. Bit of a footgun; nobody writes the full pipeline correctly the first time.