I'm really curious how much of a joke that was and wasn't
What makes you think you met it?
That means you didn't meet it[1].
[1]That balance you were talking about. You missed it. If too few people understand your content, it's not the people that's the problem. As someone attempting to present an argument, the onus is on the presenter to make the argument readable, not on the reader to squint until it gets readable.
IOW, if you can't be bothered to write your message well, why did you expect other people to be bothered to read it at all?
And it looks to me like lots of people understood.
If you've done any research into quality malware, exploits and the like (both domestic and foreign), the quality and often elegant solutions they come up with will not be somehow kneecapped by an emoji. It also only needs to support inputting one emoji in the event that someone uses this out in the field; not hard to do in shellcode.
This is where I believe security-through-obscurity is underrated. As long as you're small enough that targeted attacks aren't part of your threat model, merely being unique affords a great deal of safety. Your wierdo jerry-rigged authentication system may not be particularly robust, but it's more likely than any mainstream product to repel an automated attack.
However I do agree, at least against automated attacks; there will be a bit more security. Though if you are doing anything serious that draws attention, at that point obscurity is all but putting off the enevitable failure if you are ever targetted.