Comment by arp242

The emoji horse bolted long before Unicode. Everything from MSN Messenger to web forums had their own implementation of it. And that was a continuation of various ASCII emojis ranging from the simple :-) to the more complex ¯\_/(ツ)\_/¯

To say nothing that various emojis have been part of Unicode since pretty much the start, and was part of other encoding schemes as well (notably in Japan, but also e.g. the the "Outlook J").

And if you actually look at the changes in Unicode versions, you'll see there are tons of language-related changes in every one. To say Unicode updates are just about emoji updates is just silly. The reason you don't notice is because this is mostly for small language, obscure features in larger languages, and historical languages, and things like that.