This reminds me of a misconception a lot of people seem to have about Markdown.

It's not "wrong" to present it to readers verbatim (i.e. not rendered to HTML), since Markdown is a codification of existing plaintext conventions, and was designed to look good verbatim. In other words, though it is often used for, it is not solely a vehicle for generating HTML.

This is the main thing that drives me nuts. I'm fine with emoji, I'll even use them on purpose from time to time, but please let me decide when and how. There's nothing more infuriating than a computer replacing something I just typed with something its developer thought was better.

I had to immediately turn off emoji conversion on Discord, because not only was it annoying, it was wrong - :) was invariably replaced with something that was very definitely the emoji equivalent of :D, and :D turned into what was unmistakably XD. These are very different!!