The underlying cause of #419 is the default utf8 collation in MySQL/MariaDB, which only supports the base plane of Unicode (\u0000-\uffff). By changing the collation to utf8mb4_general_ci, stuff like ban reasons and profile text may have emoji and other non-base-plane Unicode.
The charset for playlist titles is NOT changed, and non-base-plane characters are replaced by question marks. This is because switching to utf8mb4 would make the primary key too long.