Not just different pronunciations. ê isn't about pronunciation but about indicating that "there used to be an 's' after this e". French written w/o circumflex accents doesn't change in pronunciation, not really, nor -mostly- in meaning, but it does look very annoying to French speakers as well as to native speakers of other Romance languages: the reason is that that reminder is in fact useful for translation.

I'm guessing Han unification is at least annoying like losing circumflex accents would be.