Path.read_text() without an explicit encoding uses the platform's
default encoding. On Windows this is typically cp1252 or mbcs, which
causes UnicodeDecodeError or silent data corruption when reading
UTF-8 content (JSON files, user text, config with non-ASCII chars).
This is the read-side companion to the write_text() encoding fix.
Fixed the most critical locations that read JSON data, user content,
and config files across 14 files with 31 call sites.
Pattern: .read_text() → .read_text(encoding='utf-8')
json.loads(path.read_text()) → json.loads(path.read_text(encoding='utf-8'))
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