And thus impossible to use the emoji inserting feature, and other bugs (silently replacing whitespace with different but looking the same whitespace will make for fun issues)
Well, double colon :: is just as convenient, make more sense and not a problem in either French or English. Even in English, you might want to stick an emoji to the previous word. Like Hell::devil:: (my nephew would like that though).
Double colon would make talking about perl even worse (:: is namespace separator) -- it's already bad enough that any namespace starting with D becomes an emoticon in pretty much all online editors.
This stuff should just stop. Operating Systems / Browser vendors should instead standardize on a hotkey to bring up an emoji selector that steals focus to filter via typing and inserts on enter key.