Youth maybe?

Worse though is the dependence on the plain ASCII codes, limiting their utility (if you even call them that) to GitHub's display. On a terminal (at least where I'm likely to use "git log"), it's just a bunch of dumb ASCII codes taking up line space.

I don't really get it. Why not just use the real emoji? At least it'll display properly outside of GitHub.

I liked the idea, but I agree with you that they should just have used emojis.