The NEP was merged in draft form, see below.
This is a really nice NEP, thanks Nathan! I see that questions and constructive feedback is still coming in on GitHub, but for now it seems like everyone is pretty happy with moving forward with implementing this new dtype in NumPy.
Cheers,
Rafl
To echo Ralf comments, thank you for this very well-written proposal! I particularly appreciate the detailed consideration of how to handle different models of missing values.
Overall, I am very excited about this work. A UTF8 dtype in NumPy is long overdue, and will bring significant benefits to the entire scientific Python ecosystem.