@crimle. From my experience, the key to getting non-ascii characters to display correctly is almost entirely dependent on the encoding set in your FTP client when you upload the files to your server.When you upload the files to your new server, you have to force UTF-8 encoding on the FTP client.
I don’t recall any main changes in terms of UTF-8 characters displaying properly in version 3.2.12 as compared to 3.1.8. Please try to re-upload a few files with force UTF-8 charset, and see how that works. I believe it should work once you do that.