Unicode encoding philosophy

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2023-10-04, William_J_G Overington via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
> https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2023/23212-quotes-svs-proposal.pdf
....
> about the use of italics in some text.
>
> My proposal was rejected, quite strongly.
>
> So, deep down, what please is the Unicode encoding philosophy that 
> allows variation selectors to be used to conserve some information, yet 
> not other information, in plain text?

My understanding is:
Variation selectors are not used to conserve meaningful information -
they are used to allow specific allographs of a particular grapheme to
be displayed, according to language- or region-specific conventions.
Encoding italics is different, as the italics carry meaning.