In reply to Jeff Chandler.

Heh, Five years ago is when I wrote about that event happening https://wptavern.com/nothing-to-smile-about a lot of people got upset over the change in smilies. So much so, they were reverted. It's a bummer that now WordPress may never be able to part ways with smilies and result to plugins. Unless somehow, the current smiley pack can be put into a plugin and a WordPress update can remove the old ones and force WordPress to use the ones from a plugin.

Sigh, add it to the technical debt I guess.