  Near a continuous phase transition, systems with different microscopic
origins display universal dynamics if their underlying symmetries are
compatible. In a thermally quenched system, the Kibble-Zurek mechanism for the
creation of topological defects unveils this universality through a
characteristic power-law exponent, which captures the dependence of the defect
density on the quench rate. Here, we report the observation of the Kibble-Zurek
universality in a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid. As the system's
microscopic description is tuned from bosonic to fermionic, the quench
formation of vortices reveals a constant scaling exponent arising from the
$U(1)$ gauge symmetry of the system. For rapid quenches, destructive vortex
collisions lead to the saturation of their densities, whose values can be
universally scaled by the interaction-dependent area of the vortex cores.
