The upside is that it significantly improved the adoption of Unicode in general. On desktop and mobile devices, this mostly meant more glyphs - "Unicode" fonts we had in common use in early 00s often wouldn't even have many common alphabets, much less math and science characters. I remember how some third party fonts specifically advertised full coverage of the BMP. But these days, the default system font will usually have close to full coverage.
For embedded specifically, this forced Unicode into many systems that previously didn't have it, and sucked at non-ASCII (or non-Western European) text as a result. 10 years ago, I still had to use transliterated titles for my music files to get the in-dash system in my car to show them properly; not anymore.
BTW, I don't think emojis have to be full-color images. On some platforms, sure. But e.g. on Win10, emojis are clearly vector images.
For embedded specifically, this forced Unicode into many systems that previously didn't have it, and sucked at non-ASCII (or non-Western European) text as a result. 10 years ago, I still had to use transliterated titles for my music files to get the in-dash system in my car to show them properly; not anymore.
BTW, I don't think emojis have to be full-color images. On some platforms, sure. But e.g. on Win10, emojis are clearly vector images.