[DaveBlake]

My view on this is that having reserved characters in file/folder names is perfectly acceptable and expected (used Windows too long I guess). At most maybe the wiki needs an update.

I filed the issue on GitHub back in July. I think I did a pretty good job of figuring out why this changed for Kodi 18 (note: this never happened in previous version)....

To summarize: this isn't about special characters and uniformity across platforms. It's about improperly identifying libnfs files as URIs and applying options/parameter stripping logic to those paths. The fix should be as simple as updating IsURL to return false for nfs:// and smb://.

Clearly you are more concerned about this, and if you think there is behaviour to be restored and have a fix to do that then raise a PR. But be warned, IsURL is used in many places, messing with path processing is something very fundamental and must be done with care.
 
I am based on Windows, so unable to add reserved chars to file/folder names to even investigate it