I'm not struggling with any concept.
It's a simple fact that as emojis continually get added to Unicode, not all browsers and operating systems support all emoji, and so one person sees a broken black box where another person sees the emoji. That's gross inconsistency.
Or let’s not use images because support for image formats varies across devices. Wait till we get into accuracy of color reproduction or how different decoders result in different images.
Or we can just understand that every design decision has pros and cons that must be debated, and clutching pearls on the internet without knowing the actual constraints is a futile exercise.
The website designer may use a Unicode subset that has wide support across the demographics they’ve decided are important to them.
Ancient? The submitted article is "New emojis in 2023-2024" about "the draft emoji candidates up for approval by Unicode this September". Thus, no software even supports the new emoji yet, and ironically they have to use png images to show what the emoji will look like.
I'm done talking with you. This is getting too ridiculous. Moreover, your "pearl clutching" remarks are stepping over the line and violating the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah in general but in this case it is probably just me and few friends who use that site.
It is consistent for the user on whatever system they are on. If they switch between apps, they see the same emoji that they’re familiar with.
The web developer doesn’t have to care what the icon looks like. They just say: use this emoji that semantically means “flower”. They know it may look different to other users but it will look like what that individual user is familiar with.