WebGL build fails with a UnicodeDecodeError

Unity: Web Platform

2023.3.X

2023.2.X

2022.3.X

2021.3.X

2023.1.X

2022.2.X

2022.1.X

2022.1 has reached end of life so the issue will be fixed in a newer version.

Reproduction steps:

Open the attached project (“LongLongRoad_II.zip“)
Open the “/Assets/Scenes/LongLongRoad_II.unity” Scene
Change the Build Platform to WebGL in the Build Settings (File > Build Settings > WebGL > Switch Platform)
Build And Run the project

Expected result: The project builds successfully and the WebGL Player is ran
Actual result: The project build fails

Reproducible with: 2021.2.0b1, 2021.2.19f1, 2021.3.14f1, 2022.1.23f1, 2022.2.0f1, 2023.1.0a20
Not reproducible with: 2020.3.42f1, 2021.2.0a21

Reproducible on: Windows 10 (21H2)

Note: The build fails with “UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 149859: character maps to <undefined>”