For those who haven't seen it yet, @CharlotteBuff's spectacular critique of the emoji working group's selection process for Unicode 18:

https://www.unicode.org/review/pri537/feedback.html#ID20260328102651

Somewhat brings to mind this seminal masterpiece from Michael Everson and the late Andrew West:

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17393-wg2-emoji-feedback.pdf

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My own take:

I agree insofar as the precedent by which CHIPMUNK encompasses tree‑squirrels would suggest that BUTTERFLY would encompass monarch-butterflies (and if not, then tree-squirrels should definitely be disunified), if there's any desire for a consistent character-encoding model.

Disunifications are sometimes appropriate but not to be undertaken lightly, considering that they are inherently disruptive: existing fonts or implementations will suddenly, retroäctively, be showing one codepoint with another codepoint's glyph (which, depending on the font fallback stack, might result in near-identical glyphs for two codepoints with all the security implications of that); existing documents/posts/messages will suddenly, retroäctively, be using the “wrong” character.

I was honestly quite skeptical of the disunification of U+1FAAF from the misnomered U+262C as an apparent test-case[1] for the Unicode Technical Committee setting an indefinite moratorium on new variation-selector emoji[2] considering that U+262C had *already* long been implemented with colour-emoji presentation by a certain major vendor (and may even need a technically-Unicode-nonconformant variation-selector sequence to *prevent* it from so displaying).

[1] https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2022-September/010317.html

[2] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2023/23252-legacy-disunification.pdf