Never, it’s a very effective punctuation mark. While it may not have been common in day-to-day messaging, it’s very common in writing of all sorts.

Aw man, I was always an avid user of it. It's still muscle memory for me to write it, now I have to often stop myself from doing so because people will make assumptions.

Has Claude Code stopped with the purple UI?

Whenever you tell it to do so in the personality settings, presumably.