Han Unification was invented by Chinese people (in Hong Kong iirc), not by Americans. And even before unification, the national standards also had one code point per kanji/hanzi rather than building them up out of radicals, as opposed to the way eg flag emoji are done.
JIS did this in 1978 for instance.
It does appear that computerizing CJK languages has made them very different from handwriting them; native Chinese speakers now constantly forget how to write hanzi. But they did this to themselves.
> It does appear that computerizing CJK languages has made them very different from handwriting them; native Chinese speakers now constantly forget how to write hanzi.
This is separate to the question of encoding -- phonetic-based input systems (IMEs) are a far more likely cause (there are less-widely-used shape-based IMEs which still spit out a Unicode codepoint). The same is happening to Japanese natives, though it should be noted that it's not the case that they cannot write 漢字 normally, they just might forget how to write a relatively rare one (just like how you might forget how to spell a word in English because of a dependence on autocorrect and spellcheck).
JIS did this in 1978 for instance.
It does appear that computerizing CJK languages has made them very different from handwriting them; native Chinese speakers now constantly forget how to write hanzi. But they did this to themselves.