This seems to be some oversight that there is no way to actually a way to loop over the characters of a utf8 string.
The roblox docs mention a utf8.graphemes but this doesn't seem to have been upstreamed into luau, so we would need our own utf8.graphemes in SLua to do the same.
Graphemes make more sense into what a scripter would usually want to actually intuitively access or iterate over in a string. This is very important for any platform dealing with internationalisation and emojis.
* See here for difference of the terms: https://stackoverflow.com/a/27331885
Per WolfGang:
I'm currently working on a mesh-based text renderer that needs to be able to iterate over graphemes for emojis and stuff correctly for example. But there are many other usecases like being able to properly utf8 substring without messing up graphemes such as combining characters etc.