Odd, it makes sense on a technical level when it comes to these ZWJ characters, but hiding the implementation makes sense from Safari’s point of view. I’d actually prefer that as a UNIVERSAL standard, visible symbols vs characters. (When it comes to UI)

But I can also imagine this is problematic when setting validation rules else where and now there’s a subtle foot gun buried in most web forms.

I guess the thing to learn here is to not rely on maxlength=