It strikes me as very much a current aesthetic in younger companies or smaller startups, maybe highly influenced by Notion. No one makes a list or page or calendar invite in my current company without choosing an emoji for it.

It was cool until 2022. Then LLMs started injecting these emoji everywhere and it became the chief marker for code/doc smell.

It never caught on but I always liked setting the jumbo header images on Notion docs to creepy, unsettling pictures from Unsplash.

Need to write a document about converting a Rust project to Typescript? A picture of an abandoned warehouse full of expressionless baby doll heads fits perfectly.