@drq @spacemagick You can blame Apple and the Japanese for that.

Back before Unicode, when it was up to each network provider to decide encodings for characters on their network, one of them looked at all the leftover space after all the other glyphs and thought "hey, let's put some pictures here"

That got popular, so other Japanese networks did similar (but incompatible) implementations. Eventually Unicode came along and standardized all the encodings, emoji included

And then Apple wanted to sell this new thing they were calling an "iPhone" in Japan. Only Japanese iPhones could send emoji, but everyone could receive them, causing them to break containment, and now here we are today

Emoji are actually a vast minority of each Unicode update, it's just that the general public cares more about what funny new faces (or lobsters) they can send to their friends than for some scratches in old Irish rocks (even though they're an interesting edge case, look up "Tom Scott Ogham" on YouTube)