Mysql – Can’t set up Unicode support

I am creating a toy website locally with XAMPP and I want it to support Unicode.

index.php contains a simple form that I can use to add a new entry (a UTF-8 string) to a table "myTable" in the DB. In addition to that, I am also echoing with PHP every entry from "myTable" on the body of index.php, so that I can see if the UTF-8 strings that I am entering through the form make all the way into the database and back without any issues.

Here are the measures that I took toward Unicode support:

1. Every file on my website (ex.: index.php) is encoded in UTF-8 without BOM;
2. <meta charset='utf-8'> everywhere applicable too;
3. mysqli_set_charset($myConnection, "utf-8"); in my "db.inc.php" file;
4. At the phpMyAdmin "control panel" (?), under "Database Server" I see "Server charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)";

5. I created a database and a table for this specific purpose. Here is the result of SHOW CREATE TABLE `myTable`:

   CREATE TABLE `myTable` (
`row1` varchar(16) COLLATE utf8mb4_bin NOT NULL,
`row2` varchar(32) COLLATE utf8mb4_bin NOT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8mb4 COLLATE=utf8mb4_bin

The outcome was as follows: when I print the entries of "myTable", everything does get displayed correctly on the browser indeed, however only owing to a stroke of luck, because apparently my strings are being internally represented badly. When I browse my table with phpMyAdmin I see mojibake, and I looked over at myTable.ibd and I see the same mojibake.
The string joão e maría for example, is displayed as joão e maría; for the first ã -> ã, it could be UTF-8 bytes being interpreted as latin-1, though I see ã even when I tell npp to interpret the file as UTF-8.

Running the query SELECT `row1`, HEX(`row1`) FROM `myTable` WHERE 1 I see 6A6FC383C2A36F2065206D6172C383C2AD61 as the bytes of joão e maría, so in fact the mojibake is "correctly" encoded as UTF-8 (C3 83 C2 A3 is UTF-8 for ã).

Ideas?

UPDATE

After more careful inspection I verified that mysqli_set_charset($myConnection, "utf-8"); was returning false. I replaced it with mysqli_set_charset($myConnection, "utf8"); and voilà, strings with fancy characters that I enter through the form now make it all the way into the database unscathed. However, these new strings aren't correctly displayed by the browser.

For example: the string bênção is inserted into the DB through the form. I query the table with SELECT `row`, HEX(`row1`) (...) and find out that it is stored as 62C3AA6EC3A7C3A36F inside the table, which is the correct UTF-8 representation of the string in question. I access index.php and I see b�n��o being displayed. I download the HTML of the webpage and inspect it, and I find that the offending bytes are respectively EA, E7, E3, which, surely enough, correspond to ê, ç and ã in latin-1.