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Since dns was first defined in November 1987, well before Unicode 1.0 was ratified (1991 at the earliest), what would be your suggestion to the original implementers?

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Total aside, and I have absolutely no solution for this, but: Perhaps the meta-meta-meta-problem here is that our industry is seemingly fundamentally unable to let go of flawed solutions from decades ago. Of which we have a lot -- by necessity. It's pretty much impossible to know the important flaws before something has been established and used widely enough, after which point replacing them becomes a herculean task because they have been calcified into the bedrock of our infrastructure.

There are so many examples of this:

  - DNS (for a lot of other reasons than domain names)
  - IPv4
  - TCP (see the motivation for QUIC)
  - a *lot* of incredibly obscure text encodings
  - IBM 3270 control codes
  - Sometimes even just ancient code no one understands anymore (search for the source code of Plan 9's `troff` for an example)
  - …and so on and so forth

…and if someone wants to tackle such a situation, usually the outcome is either:

  - build another hack to add to the pile of hacks we won't be able to get rid of
  - XKCD 927 (n+1 competing standards, because the old one will live on for ever anyway)
  - face second system syndrome (resulting in an overcomplicated mess)
  - get no traction because not enough people will switch to your new and shiny solution (due to the other calcified things in the stack or new flaws with the new solution)

So, my question: How should our civilization deal with this?

Even before unicode internationalisation was a thing. They couldn't have used unicode itself but they could've come up with some kind of mechanism to deal with non-English encodings.

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