The irony is, Microsoft originally put a space in "Program Files" intentionally, to force software developers to support paths with spaces in.

I don't know why developers have apparently collectively decided to go backwards. If your software doesn't support spaces there's a reasonable chance it doesn't support more exotic characters either, which really sucks if you are not natively English speaking.

> If your software doesn't support spaces there's a reasonable chance it doesn't support more exotic characters either, which really sucks if you are not natively English speaking.

The problem with space is that it's often a separator, which will not be the case for exotic characters. Fixing issues with exotic characters will not necessarily fix issues with spaces, and vice versa.

I honestly prefer having these spaces. It forces tools to actually cope with them instead of pretending spaces don't exist and breaking when they do.

It's not as much issue with tools as it is an issue when working from shell. You have to make sure to quote such paths, and autocomplete gets confused sometimes when it auto-escapes the space with \