While I appreciate a good rant just as much as the next person, most of these points have nothing to do with CSV. They are a general problem with underspecifying data, which is exactly what happens when you move data between systems.

The amount of hours I have wasted on unifying character sets across single database tables is horrifying to even think about. And the months it took before an important national dataset that supposedly many people use across several types of businesses was staggering. That fact that that XML came with a DTD was apparently not a hindrance to doing unspeakable horrors with both attributes and cdata constructs.

Sure, you can specify MM/DD/YY in a table, but it people put DD/MM/YY in there, what are you going to do about it? And that's exactly what happens in the real world when people move data across systems. That's why mojibake is still a thing in 2026.