An entertaining article, but it's not historically accurate. If you look at measured usage, UTF-8 took off around 2005 and was the dominant web encoding by 2008. Emojis weren't added to Unicode until 2010, at which point UTF-8 usage continued to increase at exactly the same rate as before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#/media/File:Utf8webgrowt...