I hate READMEs with a gazillion emojis, too much noise.

Cannot agree more. Looks kinda childish too.

It was nice when emoji were used sparingly and with purpose and intention.

As my childhood English teacher said - too much of anything, good for nothing.

Immediate reaction - LLM generated. Hard to imagine a real human picking emojis to match feature description for a long list.

Indeed, these make me back out of a project immediately if I don’t have a strong need to use it, and it takes extra cognitive effort to ignore the emojis and focus on the actually meaningful text.

To me an emoji-filled README is a good sign both the README and the project were generated by an LLM.

That's interesting. In my testing, about half the participants liked them, one didn't, and the rest didn't express a strong preference.

I kept them because they make me smile.

I needed to read your sentence a few times to figure out you don't hate README files. I too dislike emojis overuse in README files.