Joomla is still very much going and picking up convertees from WordPress right now.
Keyboard codes and strokes are dinosaurs.
No, they're really not. The reality is that actually more and more people would simply omit the degree symbol entirely and rely on context precisely because it's actually hard to type - not so much in forums, but everywhere else.
hue and cry is about 2.4?
A lot of people are fixated on the latest and greatest, however I would suggest that 2.4 bringing a new editor effectively puts a time limited lifespan on building things on the 2.2/2.3 editor.
The reality is that XF itself must have a limited timespan on 2.2/2.3's life overall. It isn't feasible to keep supporting old versions indefinitely, as it takes away time and focus from building newer versions (which we all agree are, broadly, a good thing)
PHP should be known as an 'app killer' for its ability to wipe now orphaned third-party addons
PHP makes a new release once a year and maintains (with security fixes) those releases for three years. Occasionally this timeline is even extended (e.g. 8.1 was given a 4 year support cycle rather than a 3 year cycle)
Then again I remember the wilderness years of PHP where a new feature release of the language took 3 years and then about 10 for everyone to be on a recent-enough version; I was still seeing PHP 4 apps (support ended 2008) in 2015 which just holds everything back and raises development costs even higher, because if you have to support what people have in the wild, you have to take longer than using a tightly-defined target version.
E.g. if I built something now for 7.4+ rather than 8.2+, it would provably be more work.
This is not the 'app killer' it looks like in practice.
perspective of an ordinary site publishe
I work with 'ordinary site publishers' daily, and have done for many years, none have ever asked me how to add a degree symbol.
The question, really, is it
just the degree symbol we're talking about? Or is this really just the opening to a much larger question of what other symbols you personally want, followed by what other symbols other people might want (because writing an add-on for one person is low-value-for-time-cost), and then whether we start talking about some kind of generic add-on that can add more symbols (which gets into the question of having an admin area to configure the symbols, which gets into the question of how to display the literal thousands of symbols on offer in the first place, and then realising
that list updates every couple of years too, and still doesn't even have every symbol required to write every language actually in use today on the planet, though they're almost there with India)
That's the set of questions one must ask, because it's never
just what it appears to be.