I see question my marks in my text

Hello Hodor, I think this is often due to a bad choice of charset tables in the database.

it was fine and just got broken along the upgrades

Yes, I had this case too, I think it's the default charset of the database that breaks this. To remedy, I added this in my .cnf file

init_connect = 'SET collation_connection = utf8mb4_unicode_ci'
init_connect = 'SET NAMES utf8mb4'
character-set-server = utf8mb4
collation-server = utf8mb4_unicode_ci
skip-character-set-client-handshake

it's beyond my talents 😁 UNA need to be involved in this case

LeonidS can u help?