[ygra]

Well, it was a can of worms once they took the existing characters which for the most part were culturally very tied to Japan. Now everyone had access to those fun little icons and in turn a lot of people felt concepts from their cultural surrounding underrepresented.

And while every Unicode announcement gets derided because they added more emoji, it's still just a small subset of the standard. Back when they added them I wasn't much of a fan, but by now I think it was the right decision. I still don't use them, but I've heard they're quite popular in younger age groups.