Merge branch '48241-fix-invalid-byte-sequence-in-qa' into 'master'

Resolve "QA: False failure on QA test "Push to protected branch when allowed" during staging failover rehearsal"

Closes #48241

See merge request gitlab-org/gitlab-ce!20561

qa/qa.rb

 $: << File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__))
 
+Encoding.default_external = 'UTF-8'
+
 module QA
   ##
   # GitLab QA runtime classes, mostly singletons.