Prompt Unicode encoding in UserComment inside image EXIF metadata

Right now it’s stored as UTF16LE which Windows can decode, but many other utilities do not especially with no byte order mark and they end up rendering it as Chinese (because they’re misreading the signficant byte order). Is there a reason they can’t just be stored as UTF8 which is what most software expects from Unicode? And yes, Exiftool can decode it but it actually scans all text streams and manually determines their encoding/byte order to do so.