[vvhn]

APFS doesn’t “prefer” anything - it it will not change the bytes passed to NFC or NFD. The bytes passed for creation are stored as is ( HFS will store the NFD form on disk if you pass the NFC form to it). However APFS is normalization insensitive (if you create a NFC name on disk , you won’t be able to create the NFD version and you will be able to the name by both the NFC and NFD variants) just as HFS is - they both use different mechanisms to achieve normalization insensitivity.