i believe you’re on to something, with the thought that removing it wasn’t unintentional…

i am willing to bet it was deliberate, but as a way to catch more users who refuse to upgrade from Win10 BECAUSE of Copilot. once they get more users to adopt, they simply put it back in, in one of their updates

in all seriousness, it’s likely because the origin of the emoticon is tied in with the ASCII character set, and the codes available when the emoticon was conceived. emoticons were around for decades, before we started using them on phones.

in fact, “smilies” are indeed not German!!!