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> Guess what doesn't fit in 767 bytes? VARCHAR(255) in UTF8MB4. Anything above VARCHAR(191) would not be indexable.

The utf8mb3 optimization was made before InnoDB was the default storage engine (2010).

It was widely used before it was the default.

Certainly, but let’s not rewrite history here. What innodb could/couldn’t do was not the motivation.

Why not? Even as not the default, it was an official bundled storage engine, and the cutoff just happens to occur right at its boundaries, that doesn't sound like a coincidence.

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