A lot of people don't know about this but Microsoft is taking steps to move everything over to utf-8.

They added a setting in Windows 10 to switch the code page over to utf-8 and then in Windows 11 they made it on by default. Individual applications can turn it on for themselves so they don't need to rely on the system setting being checked.

With that you can, in theory, just use the -A variants of the winapi with utf-8 strings. I haven't tried it out yet as we still support prior Windows releases but it's nice that Microsoft has found a way out from the utf-16 mess.