To an extent, the fact that they made so much software care about non-BMP characters that otherwise wouldn't and the fact that they made English speaking users

To an extent, the fact that they made so much software care about non-BMP characters that otherwise wouldn't and the fact that they made English speaking users care about characters outside Latin-1 makes it worthwhile. Even from an English speaking country, running into software that wouldn't accept the € sign was a problem until the early 10s, and I think displaying emojis drives American companies more than displaying the euro sign or kanji. So I'll give emojis in Unicode a wide pass on criticism for their effect in making everyone actually support all of unicode, and making people give up things like MySQL's utf8mb3.