There is no difference between a glyph that displays a letter and a glyph that displays an image, it's an arbitrary matter of the encoding between code points and a font. And as emoji are already part of Unicode, they're just as much "text" as ASCII.
That's technically correct but, when working with console and text processing stuff emojis and other multi-byte characters complicate the things sometimes.
My native language also requires unicode characters to type correctly, and they create the same problems hence, I also prefer avoiding these characters.
These are my preferences, I cannot (and should not) stop the progress. However for me, simplicity and practicality is much better than fanciness.
I'd not fight over this stuff if I was contributing to a project which embraces these concepts and play along without any fuss or objection but, I won't use these in my own projects.
