UTF-16 is an abomination. It's only easy to parse because it's artificially limited to 1 or 2 code units. It's an ugly hack that requires reserving 2048 code points ("surrogates") from the Unicode table just for the encoding itself.

It's also the reason why Unicode has a limit of about 1.1 million code points: without UTF-16, we could have over 2 billion (which is the UTF-8 limit).