OK, this is annoying. I made the mistake of using Git on Windows. I generated a patch which I sent to a Linux machine to be merged.
Of course nothing worked.
Why? Well, first of all the entire file was UTF-16, because of course it was. Then there was CRLF line endings. That wouldn't be too much of a problem, except for the fact that the damn thing had somehow managed to save UTF-8 encoded characters, parsed as Latin-1 and then stored as UTF-16.
I had to change all the broken characters manually in the patch prior to merging it.
Why is encoding problems a thing in 2023? And why it it only Windows that suffers from it?