I realize that. I'm just sad to see UTF-16 vestiges living on, in current specs. Who can fathom how much misery and billions of dollars in wasted productivity (byte order marks - fun!) that wrought upon the IT landscape....
Python has an upper case \UXXXXXXXX literal that seems a lot cleaner.
You don't have to escape unicode. If you want to just use Unicode and encode as UTF-8 then go nuts.
This is valid JSON:
{ "äöü": "大家好", "clef": "𝄞" }