Isn't it?! There's plenty of talking about how "we're regressing to hieroglyphs", but that doesn't capture the nuance in usage of emojis in different languages.
Your example expands well to old-school emoticons. Where I live, an "xD" serves as a laugh and is used in rather general way. Meanwhile in the Anglosphere it's stereotypically associated with specific demographics
As an American who uses it (well, a variant, XD) and knows where I adopted it, I'll hazard a guess: millennial men who were extremely online in the late 2000s and early 2010s, during the Golden Age of phpBB and before the rise of the smartphone and modern social media.
Your example expands well to old-school emoticons. Where I live, an "xD" serves as a laugh and is used in rather general way. Meanwhile in the Anglosphere it's stereotypically associated with specific demographics