It is, because if you think about it, it's a top-down approach to something intimately integrated into most everyone's lives - into engineers' lives for sure. As it's top-down, it will be applied to everyone (to an extent), and as the source of it is just a bunch of humans, it's beholden to politics and intricacy, and so, controversy as well.
A million things are like that, people are profoundly stupid, it's only ever an issue if someone invests money to cut propaganda against it to make people hate it. "Unicode gives us a shared codepoint space for all languages in the world, a deeply anti American idea, it fundamentally contradicts the ethno nationalist ideal our country was founded upon!"
