Words don’t have precise meanings either.

“He has completed the task.”

versus

“He pulled it off.”

Their meanings are the same but their both have different subtext.

Emojis are simply additional levers for subtext. It’s like using a red hot colors versus cool colors for a poster — the text might be the same but the colors provide an additional way to signal subtext.

The more options, the better.

Short text communication has a way of being read as terse, rude, or with some other unintended emotion by the recipient so I think it’s a valuable way to communicate concisely but also encode the mood of the words

And yes, many things can be communicated purely on emotion and no words, which in short form is also valuable

Emojis are stupid, but Japanese phone industry was weaponizing it to segregate smartphones into a niche subclass of non-serious phone-likes than actually usable phones, and so Google/Apple shoved it into Unicode to fill that moat. In hindsight, Slack style :emoji-name: notation might have done better for all, but Unicode emoji was what happened.

I used “decorative emojis” (some colored circles) to essentially color-code the labels in an app I don’t control that only let me provide text labels. It’s a little subjective, but I do believe it enhanced communication, from the data to the user, in that case.

Decorative emojis (the stuff AI loves to add to bullet lists) don't do much. On the other hand I'd say emojis at the start/end of a sentence are as meaningful as emoticons or /s or any other Internet shorthand for conveying intent.

I think they are overused and thus lose effectiveness. I don't really like them and don't use them myself but I'm not going to fight a battle over them.

I believe they do. When people talk in person, there is a lot of non verbal communication that give context to their words (smiles, shrugs, side glances, etc). Even when it's just people talking over the phone, the way they pronounce words carries information (it's a lot easier to tell if someone is being sarcastic if you hear their voice, for example). So, emojis are useful for providing that missing context.

Unquestionably enrich. Emojis and words are not mutually exclusive, communication is overall improved by allowing a richer variety of expression.

Most words don't have especially precise meanings, context is everything. So emojis being imprecise is not a unique problem.

And emojis can be especially dense with information in a way that can be pretty convenient. You can scan a 96x32 pixel block of 3 emojis to quickly gather information that would have required reading 1-2 whole sentences, potentially.

Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful. You can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or friend to express your gratitude or thanks for something without having to prevaricate over exactly what language to use to avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.

They obviously make communication worse. I frequently trigger the stupid emoji keyboard by accident on my phone and every time I do I wish it wouldn't exist.

It also doesn't help that we already had perfectly acceptable emoticon systems beforehand that were better than current emojis because they were customizable.