This leaves us with 830,606 to work with. Is that really such a 'huge mistake'?
Text rendering has become a lot more complicated and memory-intensive. Glyphs used to be plain quadratic Bézier paths, but now there’s hundreds of full-color images — and if your drawings don’t look as pretty as Apple’s copyrighted emoji designs, someone will complain.
For embedded specifically, this forced Unicode into many systems that previously didn't have it, and sucked at non-ASCII (or non-Western European) text as a result. 10 years ago, I still had to use transliterated titles for my music files to get the in-dash system in my car to show them properly; not anymore.
BTW, I don't think emojis have to be full-color images. On some platforms, sure. But e.g. on Win10, emojis are clearly vector images.