From Open Source Defense:

To say that the cartoon depiction of a gun is unacceptable to display in-text on any modern tech platform is actually pretty radical. It means that the mere sight of a gun — a cartoon gun — is an inherent obscenity. And purely from a software engineering perspective, disregarding the Unicode standard to enforce that was unprecedented.

For six years, we lived in that world. Today, at least on X, we don’t. But imagine that Elon hadn’t bought X and we were stuck with water pistols for the long haul. Most people using a smartphone today remember when a pistol was a pistol. But after about two decades, the collective memory would have faded and the water pistol would seem utterly normal. The real pistol would seem aberrant, and as a result there’d be no hope of bringing it back. There’d be a new status quo, and going back to the old one would seem radical.