If I am distributing an app that uses the installed SQLite, you expect me to build a special version of SQLite and bundle it with my app?? Or require some weird extensions?
Unicode is about 300,000 characters at most.
That is, do you compile and distribute the version from sqlite.org or do you depend on someone else to package it for you?
If the former, then change the compile flags.
If the latter, isn't the problem that your distro/packaging provider didn't enable the flags you wanted? Complain to them.
As a quick look, I see https://github.com/karlb/sqlite-icu claims "includes a loadable icu extension module for sqlite. This allows other python packages to use this extension without requiring dependencies outside of the python ecosystem". I've never tried it.
There are also alternate sqlite bindings for Python, like https://github.com/coleifer/cysqlite .
I'm saying the reasons given for certain architectural choices do not make much sense to me. And I'm also using this example to call out people who make claims that SQLite is on par with PostgreSQL for production use.