That keyboard shortcut brings it up, unless you've already brought it up on a different workspace, in which case that shortcut does nothing (until you find the previous workspace where it was brought up, and dismiss it there).

I had no idea it was usable from the keyboard until I read this comment. There's a search box but it's invisible and hidden until you type blindly at a window that doesn't look like it accepts keys.

Terminal mostly supports emoji, but has many bugs. Some emoji, after being typed and deleted, don't properly restore the cursor to its original position.

ASCII may be ugly but works 100% of the time for me. I tried using emoji on macOS 10.14.5 Terminal just now and ran into every issue you said you don't encounter.

What should the other 87% of people do in the interest of fairness?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

It's also easy on Windows

You mean Windows 10 newer than LTSB.

Where it hasn’t been disabled by their employer.

For at least ~20% of them, use an input method editor which is just as capable of emitting emoji as true text!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet

Except, that's not really "easy". I prefer typing with buttons, not having to pull up a picker and search for each character. As others have mentioned, I don't want to pull up some window to grep through a commit log; I work very quickly in the terminal, and this would be an awful interruption to my flow.