In order to get this extension to work in MediaWiki 1.39.x for MySQL, first, you need to change VARBINARY(255) back to VARCHAR(255) binary (maintenance->archive directory) and tables-generated.sql. Then, if you using MySQL 8.0, you can set the charset to be utf8mb4 and the collation to be utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci. You also have to change some code in the installer (includes/installer/Mysql*.php). That fixes everything except for links. This extension will then fix the links.