whats the point of the meta tag i dont understand it?

UTF-8 encoding is probably the most often used one in the western world. It's capable of displaying many languages accurately, that wouldn't show up properly in your html if you would remove this meta tag.

Example: in german words like "Tschüss!" (bye!) or "Gruß" (greating) the letters 'ü' and 'ß' won't be displayed, if you don't include the utf-8 meta tag. You can try it out!

There are other encoding methods, many of which are outdated, have security vulnerabilities, don't work as seamless when using multiple languages in html, or are just not as "slim" as utf-8. It also works very well across different browsers.

When browsing east asian websites for example, like korean websites, one can still encounter a lot of websites that use encoding that won't be displayed in different browsers, as they often favor IE, and can require quite some research ;-P

You might have a look at the W3C information pages on this topic: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-choosing-encodings.en

happy learning & coding!