Issue saving strings on Laravel

I'm having issues storing text on Laravel. I'm trying to store product names but some characters (I only found one but I guess there's more) are not being properly stored on database so when are retrieved are not shown correctly.

This is what made me notice:

Table <0,5

It should say:

Table < 0,5

I've noticed that on the database it's stored as Table <0,5 but on some sections of the web it's shown correctly (?). My idea is that in any case it should be stored as Table < 0,5.

The column type on the database it's defined as varchar(191) utf8_unicode_ci.

I don't think it's a utf-8 issue as the main language is spanish and we are working with accents with no issues.

It's Laravel 5.7 (I know it's old, we are working on ridding off)

This is how I'm storing the new products:

public function store(Request $request)
   {
    // Some validations

    $product = new Product;
    
    ...

    $product->name = $request->name;

    $product->save();
 }

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