You are not the only one and I would like to think that I am still perfectly capable of having fun. Maybe it is a generational thing, but I find emojis immensely distracting and impairing my ability to read as my eyes will fixate on the emoji first rather than the text itself. Reading documentation recently was pure torture when someone had insisted on sprinkling emojis over it. What is worse, it usually is pure decoration rather than meaning so I am almost tempted to write a tool to rip them out to make reading easier for me.

For me, it's that emojis tend to be very high context since they're basically pictograms. They add communication overhead because you have to think about what they mean, and what the writer intends them to mean, and whether those are the same.

Same, and I don’t think I’ve forgotten how to have fun. They just add visual noise and don’t really add information. I could see them being used in a disciplined way where the emojis replace text sometimes, but when the emoji is redundant with the text right next to it then there isn’t really much value.

They feel like the modern equivalent of web pages in the 90s that would have excessive images like the Under Construction image or the GIF of the spinning siren : visual clutter.

It's like bold, if overused, it's visual noise. It distracts from the message and clutters the view.

It's the new age of the blink tag and marquee text ;)

No. You're just remembering the last time infrastructure "fun" exploded on you, and the time you spent fixing it.

It's because they don't add anything. If you removed them all the page would be no worse.