Of course it depends on skillful execution.
Hoping to hear the name for this trend as it's a very interesting one indeed. Done well it seems like this is definitely the new wave as we continue to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator. Done poorly, well I've done this and will just tell you the results are about as bad as you'd expect.
In fact, I doubt you could really express anything beyond the simplest concepts with emojis in a language-agnostic fashion.
Actually I'll go a step further: the idea of emoji as a language agnostic writing system is dumb. It's equivalent to pictograms, and like Chinese, will only become useful when you have a massive set of them, and you assign multiple layers of meaning for particular combinations that eventually take you down the path of culture-specific language anyways.
I think the emojis in theory could aid in machine translation - that is - if the machine translation has some ambiguity, maybe the emoji could help, then again, I bet animal names and the concepts that an emoji can convey are the easy part of translation, so I guess I've convinced myself you probably are right.
With that said, I do think that they could still act as visual aids and assist memory/retention, at least for some folks, though I'll admit at this point I'm trying to create a justification for the sake of doing it.
They're not a tool. They're for fun. It's their original purpose, and it's what they do best, and it's not at all clear to me that we need to pretend they can do anything more -- fun is sufficient justification for their existence.
The only real problem is that most emoji character sets don't properly optimize for that. They pretend they're far too important to simply be fun, and they instead become fairly ugly "realistic" depictions of whatever they're representing. ASCII art is somehow still dramatically more appealing, despite (or perhaps because of) emojis having much more freedom. Or actually more likely, it's because the only people who get to draw this stuff are the BigCo's, and they are not.. fun.
I mean hell, the most basic ASCII emoji (smiley :) is still better than Apple's emoji
Any useful utility for emoji will be at best in addition to written language, not in replacement of it.
And the major blocker is definitely the lack of composability; you have a very strict and very limited set of options to work with (and without composition, the rule "limitation breeds creativity" doesn't apply), so I have little hope for significant creativity to appear
Picard and Dathon, at El-Adrel.
For anyone else who needs a reminder, have a read: https://www.startrek.com/article/picard-and-dathon-at-el-adr...
The same thing could be said about words.
exciting times!