People were doing this before llms, otherwise how did they learn it?

Sure, but llms absolutely love to do it for some reason.

I just took a look at a Readme I had cursor write a couple months ago and there's no emojis

You can always have it in your custom prompt: "Do not use emojis, ever".

I had a manager who did this in his slack messages

That's why he said "never again"

spell out 'development' with hammer emojis. bring ascii art back as emoji art.

(i actually do this in slack messages and folks find it funny and annoying, but more funny)