At one time it was a concern that malicious actors would spoof urls with unicode confusables. Chrome (and others, but unsure of the exact list) implemented restrictions on displaying unicode characters to try to prevent this: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i...
This has happened with phishing emails - we recently had one at my workplace. Chrome's spoofing protection really helped us out with that one as even if you didn't notice it in the mail, the big blaring xn-- was enough for most people to realise it was phishing.
