[WorldMaker]

Emoji are an almost critical Unicode democratizing need. They aren't doing anything that other languages encoded with Unicode don't already do (and haven't already done since the beginning of Unicode). This article itself points out several key existing relatives, such as how Arabic, one of the most common and important written languages in the world, or the very important CJK family of written languages, used ZWJ and ZWNJ well before Emoji made it "cool" to other parts of the world, most especially the English-writing contingent that has long thought of Unicode as simply "ASCII plus a bunch of other stuff I might never use". Suddenly a lot of English documents have embedded emoji that deeply matters to the writers, and there are fewer excuses to treat Unicode as "ASCII+" and more cases where doing so is not only wrong (broken surrogate pairs, incorrect codepoint analysis for ZWJ, etc), but very visibly wrong in a way that users care and complain about it.