At lot of these emoji had strong use cases back when emoji were invented - on flip phones with small screens that had rich i-mode (think "Japanese WAP") services where you could book hotel rooms, access paid video and news content, etc. That's where it was handy having compact symbols in order to make lists of hotels that had rooms or were full up (π³/π΅), and indicate which links to content were free or paid (π/πΆ), and so on
Yeah. Wild seeing how much got done on those tiny screens in Japan. I've always been impressed with the 'information density' opportunities of logographic writing schemes (the ability to convey significant information with a single pictograph). You can cram a lot of characters into an emoji, I guess, but there's a useful limit.
