Found an interesting source on the wiki for emoji, basically Unicode 1 wanted to encode all existing text, it wasn't until Unicode 6 that they widened the scope

Found an interesting source on the wiki for emoji, basically Unicode 1 wanted to encode all existing text, it wasn't until Unicode 6 that they widened the scope to include "characters" that don't exist yet: > For the majority of characters that are not emoji, the UTC looks for evidence of existing usage as text. Proposers need to establish that there is some reasonable body of text, either modern or historic, that uses that character. ... > For emoji, rather than look for evidence of existing textual use — since emoji effectively cannot exist in text until they are encoded — we look for evidence of likely high usage once they are encoded, plus a number of other factors. https://unicode.org/emoji/principles.html https://unicode.org/emoji/principles.html