I'm more surprised that he took the time to use an accent mark. Either a copy-paste to make sure he got it right, or lots of extra time changing his keyboard back and forth.
If they're not on their phone (which they probably are as others have pointed out), maybe they're just a Pokémon fan. I memorized the keyboard combo for the accented "é" about 25 years ago because of this. (Alt+130)
I never interacted with Pokemon (i think I was a few years too old for it) - but I used to have to write a lot of international names down for work related reasons, and therefore eventually had all the accented letter win-alt-key codes memorised - though I can't really remember them all now (I've used Linux only for about 15 years).
I don't think I'd remember many now - for example, I was convinced é was ALT+0233, but I could easily be mixing it up with one of the others.
Or he knows the ascii representation of the symbol (https://sites.psu.edu/symbolcodes/windows/codealt/, it also works under Linux, the shortcut is crtl+shift+u and requires the unicode representation as a hexadecimal).