This issue was also raised in the Sphinx Github. I experienced this problem using Sphinx inside Docker. @grubert mentioned on Github that this may be due to setting LC_ALL=C, which apparently is set inside containers, that defaults the line-by-line reading of files to use ASCII. One fix that I tested was enforcing the open() commands to use the UTF-8 encoding (with encoding flag) rather than leaving it empty and implicit. Not sure if you'd want to do that though.
This issue was also raised in the Sphinx Github. I experienced this problem using Sphinx inside Docker. @grubert mentioned on Github that this may be due to setting LC_ALL=C, which apparently is set inside containers, that defaults the line-by-line reading of files to use ASCII. One fix that I tested was enforcing the open() commands to use the UTF-8 encoding (with encoding flag) rather than leaving it empty and implicit. Not sure if you'd want to do that though.