They also did the same regarding race. Used to be that person emojis were always non-descript in that regard. Most implementations used Simpsons-yellow skin, and Android used a green, non-humanoid character.

Nowadays, the more recent human emojis tend to have a bunch of realistic skin tone options as well as Simpsons-yellow default, but they haven’t gone back and made those options for many of the older emojis.