If a developer knows and understands the concept of character encoding ("It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses"), at least they will know how to read a string from one system and move it to a different system that expects a different encoding. They'll know that they need to call the relevant conversion routine in a specialized library that knows how to handle the conversion.
With this, maybe they won't be able to correctly build or modify their own strings directly. But being able to handle strings from an external system that produces them, and passing them to another system that consumes them, without breaking them in the process, IMHO does qualify as "the absolute minimum" they should know.
If a developer knows and understands the concept of character encoding ("It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses"), at least they will know how to read a string from one system and move it to a different system that expects a different encoding. They'll know that they need to call the relevant conversion routine in a specialized library that knows how to handle the conversion.
With this, maybe they won't be able to correctly build or modify their own strings directly. But being able to handle strings from an external system that produces them, and passing them to another system that consumes them, without breaking them in the process, IMHO does qualify as "the absolute minimum" they should know.