The string type is broken
The string type isn't broken. If anything these "X is broken" posts are broken. Taking one special case, finding problems with that case and deducing that the whole concept must therefore be discarded is just silly. Strings work fine for the vast majority of use cases. No technology is free of flaws and engineering decisions are almost always based on weighting the pros and cons and choosing a solution that on balance works best. Strings are a useful feature and Unicode is a notoriously hard problem. Proposing to go back to arrays of characters makes things worse for most people in most cases and therefore is not a practical solution.