Personally I think the whole emoji thing is a triumph of Unicode. Being able to convey more subtext through emoji makes communication so much easier especially across language boundaries.

It's classic scope creep resulting in unmanageable bloat.

I'm okay with smileys, but Unicode wasn't the right standard to deal with it. Unicode maybe wasn't the right standard to deal with anything.

At least nothing is wiggling. Of those Unicode points which are graphical, at least all of them can still be printed on paper and won't require a screen. I wonder how long that invariant lasts.