Box-drawing chars (U+2500), em dashes (U+2014), and en dashes (U+2013)
in comments, section dividers, log messages, and docstrings are not
representable on legacy code pages like CP1252. Replace them with plain
ASCII dashes so the codebase is consistently ASCII-safe.
User-facing UI strings (placeholders, separators, display text in the
frontend) are left unchanged since they render in the browser which
handles Unicode natively.
