I would not call US-ASCII an achievement. A majority of the world's languages (whatever the exact metric might be...) cannot be written using using US-ASCII

Email (SMTP) was defind 7 bit and it took us 2 decades to work somewhat reliably with other languages requiring more characters.

Of course it's parochial. The very name is United States-American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is an antique standard for teletype machines that can still be read and decoded by everything on the planet. It is as close to universal as anything we have. There is a reason that the first 128 decimal code characters in UTF-8 are US-ASCII...

ASCII is good when it works. Of course, not everything can be written suitably in ASCII, but if it can be, then it should be. As they said, "[it] can still be read and decoded by everything on the planet. It is as close to universal as anything we have."