Are you sure something has changed? Download an old version of Defold and try. As far as I know the relevant code hasn’t changed in a long time.
This isn’t Defold specific. It’s how Lua works. Open a Lua command line interpreter and this is what you get:
$ lua
Lua 5.1 Copyright (C) 1994-2006 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> local s = "¶" print(#s)
2
>
If you in the middle of a string add \182 (eg “foo\182bar”) and expect it to result in foo¶bar then yeah, that will not be the actual result, for reasons I explained in my previous post (Lua strings being a sequence of bytes and the label and text node expecting UTF8 encoded strings). For anything outside the 0-127 range where you want to add it as escaped bytes like above you need to ensure that what gets added to the string is UTF8 encoded.