No, this is not fixed. The character set utf8 is still broken.

It’s great that Debian MariaDB sets the default charset to utf8mb4. (It’s great that MySQL now has this default, too.) That seems like the best default to me.

But changing the default isn’t enough. It’s still up to users to:

• NeverSET NAMES utf8
• Never set a table or column to have CHARSET utf8
• Never set a table or column to have COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci
• Never write utf8 in a MySQL configuration file
• Never configure your MySQL client library (in any programming language) to use the utf8 charset
• Always mistrust documentation concerning MySQL and MariaDB: even in 2018, most guides on the Internet (including MySQL’s own website) are wrong.