> User would like Python logging of Unicode characters to be consistent

It is consistent. The encoding of

    logging.basicConfig(filename='c:\\my_log.log')

is consistent with the encoding of

    open('c:\\my_log.log')

Both use the system default encoding, which is not UTF-8. There is some discussion going on right now, as to whether it *should* be, but it isn't, and I wouldn't consider changing the behaviour of loging *without* changing the behaviour of open() to be consistent.

Logging to the console is consistent with the standard IO streams, and it was PEP 528 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0528/) that made that change - before that, the standard IO streams, and logging to the console, used the console codepage.

So, while I agree that the behaviour takes a bit of work to understand, it's not (IMO) inconsistent, nor is it (IMO) a bug.