> A lot of complexity simply doesn't stem from emoji in Unicode, a lot of the complexity comes from all the writing systems that Unicode supports.
Yes, it's not that emoji are doing anything odd compared to lots of real world languages, it's that emoji are just latin script writers' "first"/"only"/"most likely" interaction with that sort of stuff. The fascinating bit that that if it weren't for emoji a lot of these problems would still go unfixed in a lot of real languages, but because emoji are fun and everyone wants to use them we've seen a lot of Unicode fixes brought about by emoji that's a rising tide to lift other Unicode boats.
Yes, it's not that emoji are doing anything odd compared to lots of real world languages, it's that emoji are just latin script writers' "first"/"only"/"most likely" interaction with that sort of stuff. The fascinating bit that that if it weren't for emoji a lot of these problems would still go unfixed in a lot of real languages, but because emoji are fun and everyone wants to use them we've seen a lot of Unicode fixes brought about by emoji that's a rising tide to lift other Unicode boats.